Consider Donders's experiment comparing the reaction times in responding to a light stimulus. What did he suggest as the reason why participants took the longest amount of time to make a decision in the choice condition?

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To unpack this question about Donders's experiment, we need to compare the different elements of reaction time tasks he studied.
Option 1: 'It was the most confusing condition.' This statement misframes the key idea. Donders’s work focused on processing stages, not on how confusing the task felt to participants, so this option misses the theoretical point entirely.
Option 2: 'It required detection and discrimination only.' While detection and discrimination are important components of some reaction-time tasks, this option omits the crucial decision component that follows discrimination in the choice condition. It therefore underrepresents the cognitive processing required in the choice condition.
Option 3: 'It required them having to choose between two behavioral responses.' This captures the aspect of selecting between responses but ignores the earlier required perceptual processing (detection and discrimination) that precedes the choice. In other words, it describes only part of the processing chain and would imply a shorter overall task than Donders found for the choice condition.
Option 4: 'It required detection and discrimination and they had to choose between two behavioral responses.' This combines both perceptual processing (detection and discrimination) and the decision step (choosing between two responses), which aligns with Donders’s conclusion that the choice condition adds an extra decision stage beyond simple detection or discrimination alone. The overall reasoning is that reaction time increases because of an additional processing stage for selecting between alternatives, not just detecting or discriminating the stimulus. Hence, this option best matches the theoretical account of the longest decision time in the choice condition.

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Consider Donders's experiment comparing the reaction times in responding to a light stimulus. What did he suggest as the reason why participants took the longest amount of time to make a decision in the choice condition?

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