Latency differentiation of hits and false alarms in an operant-psychophysical test.

Jenkins et al. (1973) ran a psychophysical test with pigeons. Birds pecked a key when they saw a bright light. Sometimes the light was dim. The team recorded how fast each peck happened. They wanted to know if wrong pecks looked different from right pecks.

Wrong pecks took longer. The dimmer the light, the longer the delay. Right pecks stayed quick. The gap between right and wrong shrunk as the light got brighter. Latency, not just yes/no, carried the signal.

Rose et al. (2000) later used the same idea in kids. They painted rooms different colors during functional analyses. Clear cues helped half the children show their problem behavior faster. The lab trick became a clinic tool.

Thomas et al. (1968) seemed to disagree. They showed that mixing two cues gave middle response rates, not faster ones. But they measured rate, not speed. Latency catches tiny differences that rate can hide.

Duker et al. (1991) moved the logic to memory. They found that long gaps between sample and choice hurt accuracy more than long gaps between choice and food. Again, time matters more than we thought.

You already record correct and incorrect. Add a stopwatch. If a child's wrong answer takes half a second longer, the task may be too hard. Shave the difficulty until the latency gap closes. You get a live dial for stimulus control.