TheoreTical and review arTicles Decision noise: An explanation for observed violations of signal detection theory

and useful tool for analyzing performance across a wide spectrum of psychological tasks, from single-cell recordings and perceptual discrimination to high-level categorization, medical decision making, and memory tasks. The utility of SDT comes from its clear and simple account of how detection or classification performance can be translated into psychological quantities, such as sensitivity and bias. Whether its use is appropriate for a specific application depends on a number of underlying assumptions, and even though these assumptions are rarely tested, SDT has proved useful enough that it is considered one of the great successes of cognitive psychology. Yet, SDT has also undergone criticism, which began to emerge when this theory was relatively young.