Do reaction time and accuracy measure the same aspects of letter recognition?

Two experiments indicate that reaction time and accuracy are not always equivalent measures of the underlying processes involved in the recognition of visually presented letters. In conjunction with the results of previous work, our research suggests the following generalizations: (a) Under data-limited viewing conditions (the short exposure durations of the typical tachistoscopic task), response accuracy is sensitive to early perceptual interference between target and noise items, whereas reaction time is more sensitive to later processes involved in response interference. (b) Under resource-limited viewing conditions (the long exposure durations of the typical reaction time task), both accuracy and reaction time appear to be sensitive to processes occurring in the later rather than the earlier stages of processing. Since the two dependent measures do not always reflect the same perceptual processes, we suggest that the convergence of reaction time and accuracy within the context of a specific information processing model should be demonstrated empirically rather than assumed a priori.