The emergence of computer-based assessments has made response times, in addition to response accuracies, available as a source of information about test takers’ latent abilities. The development of substantively meaningful accounts of the cognitive process underlying item responses is critical to establishing the validity of psychometric tests. However, existing substantive theories such as the diffusion model have been slow to gain traction due to their unwieldy functional form and regular violations of model assumptions in psychometric contexts. In the present work, we develop an attention-based diffusion model based on process assumptions that are appropriate for psychometric applications. This model is straightforward to analyse using Gibbs sampling and can be readily extended. We demonstrate our model’s good computational and statistical properties in a comparison with two well-established psychometric models.

基于计算机的评估的出现使得除了反应准确性之外，反应时间也可以作为有关考生潜在能力的信息来源。对项目反应背后的认知过程进行实质性有意义的描述对于建立心理测试的有效性至关重要。然而，现有的实质性理论（例如扩散模型）由于其笨拙的功能形式以及在心理测量背景下经常违反模型假设而缓慢地获得关注。在目前的工作中，我们基于适合心理测量应用的过程假设开发了一种基于注意力的扩散模型。该模型可以使用吉布斯采样直接进行分析，并且可以轻松扩展。通过与两个成熟的心理测量模型的比较，我们展示了我们的模型良好的计算和统计特性。