DetectionTheory

DetectionTheory.jl is a Julia package to compute signal detection theory measures. Signal detection theory (SDT) is commonly used in psychophysics to quantify the performance of an observer in a variety of tasks. DetectionTheory.jl includes functions to compute d' for the following tasks:

Most of the functions have been ported from the psyphy R package.

Installation and Usage

DetectionTheory can be installed using:


Pkg.add("DetectionTheory")

once the package is installed, to access the functions in the module you can type:

using DetectionTheory

A complete description of each function is given in the Function Reference section. Information on individual functions can also be obtained using the Julia help system:


?dprimeABX
?dprimeSD

A few usage examples for DetectionTheory functions are given in the next section.

Examples

Compute d' for an ABX task for an observer with a hit rate of 0.8 and a false alarm rate of 0.4. If we assume that the observer is following a differencing strategy, we can compute d' with:

dprimeABX(0.8, 0.4, "diff")

1.7627692904717474

if we assume that the observer is using an independent observations strategy instead, we can compute d' with:

dprimeABX(0.8, 0.4, "IO")

1.5697504400191788

d' for the same-different and odd-one-out tasks can also be computed for either the differencing, or the independent observations strategies. For an observer with a hit rate of 0.7 and a false alarm rate of 0.2 in the same-different task:

dprimeSD(0.7, 0.2, "diff") #differencing strategy
dprimeSD(0.7, 0.2, "IO") #independent observations strategy

2.120261690763577

for an observer with a proportion of correct responses of 0.7 in the odd-one-out task:

dprimeOddity(0.7, "diff") #differencing strategy
dprimeOddity(0.7, "IO") #independent observations strategy

2.1012488567369276

To compute d' in a Yes-No task for an observer with a hit rate of 0.6 and a false alarm rate of 0.3:

dprimeYesNo(0.6, 0.3)

0.7777476158438406

To compute the d' value corresponding to a proportion of correct responses of 0.75 in a 2-alternatives forced choice task:

dprimeMAFC(0.75, 2)

0.9538725524089406

for a 3-alternatives forced choice task:

dprimeMAFC(0.75, 3)

1.433830587497066