Application
Inhibition theory has especially been developed to account for the short-term oscillation as well as the long-term trend in the reaction time curves obtained in continuous response tasks such as the Attention Concentration Test (ACT). The ACT typically consists of an overlearned prolonged work task in which each response elicits the next. Several authors, among them Binet (1900), stressed the importance of the fluctuation in the reaction times suggesting the mean deviation as a measure of performance. In this connection it is also worthwhile to mention a study by Hylan (1898). He used, in his experiment B, a 27 single digits addition task. He not only pointed to the importance of the fluctuation of reaction times, but he was also the first one who reported gradually increasing (marginally decreasing) reaction time curves (Hylan, 1898, page 15, figure 5).
Recently, the inhibition model has been used also to explain the phase durations in binocular rivalry experiments (van der Ven, Gremmen & Smit, 2005). The model is capable to account for the statistical properties of the alternating phase durations
T11, T01, T12, T02, T13, T03, ...,
representing the amounts of time a person perceives the stimulus in one eye T1j and in the other eye T0j.
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