An Attention-Based Diffusion Model for Psychometric Analyses

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.