Item response and response time model for personality assessment via linear ballistic accumulation

Abstract

On the basis of a combination of linear ballistic accumulation (LBA) and item response theory (IRT), this paper proposes a new class of item response models, namely LBA IRT, which incorporates the observed response time (RT) by means of LBA. Our main objective is to develop a simple yet effective alternative to the diffusion IRT model, which is one of best-known RT-incorporating IRT models that explicitly models the underlying psychological process of the elicited item response. Through a simulation study, we show that the proposed model enables us to obtain the corresponding parameter estimates compared with the diffusion IRT model while achieving a much faster convergence speed. Furthermore, the application of the proposed model to real personality measurement data indicates that it fits the data better than the diffusion IRT model in terms of its predictive performance. Thus, the proposed model exhibits good performance and promising modeling capabilities in terms of capturing the cognitive and psychometric processes underlying the observed data.