Making strides in modeling individual differences: reply to Leite, Ratcliff, and White (2007)

Leite, Ratcliff, and White (2007) claimed that the diffusion model (Ratcliff, 1978) could simulate the molar patterns in response times (RTs) from the multiple tasks observed by Chen, Hale, and Myerson (2007). We present our own simulations to clarify the underlying mechanisms and show that, as is predicted by the difference engine model (Myerson, Hale, Zheng, Jenkins, & Widaman, 2003), correlations across tasks are the key to the molar patterns in individual RTs. Although the diffusion model and other sequential-sampling models may be able to accommodate patterns of RTs across tasks like those studied by Chen et al., the difference engine is the only current model that actually predicts them.