THE WEIBULL DISTRIBUTION, THE POWER-LAW, AND THE INSTANCE THEORY OF AUTOMATICITY

H. Colonius (1995) agreed with the fundamental tenets of the instance theory of automaticity. His article addressed the mathematical development of the theory, pointing out an error in one of two arguments that G.D. Logan (1988,1992) used to justify the choice of the Weibull as the distribution of retrieval times and suggesting an alternative argument that places different emphasis on the power function speedup and the Weibull distribution. This article attempts to clarify the problematic argument, point out some practical limitations on H. Colonius's (1995) alternative argument, and suggest important future directions for the mathematical development of the theory.