What should your reaction time be

Vary when you drop the ruler: For example, you could drop on the count of five first, then drop on two. Do most people have a similar reaction time? Are older people faster than younger people? Are girls faster than boys? Does reaction time improve with practice? Repeat this activity and compare your results when you use your dominant hand—the hand you write with—and when you use your other hand. Is there any difference between hands? Do your responses slow with so many sensory signals?

Observations and results Did you and your partner usually catch the ruler around 15 centimeters six inches? What took so long? On average, reaction time takes between and milliseconds. If that sounds like a long time, think about how much has to happen for you to react. When your eye sees the ruler falling, information travels from sensory cells called neurons from the eye to the brain's visual cortex, an area devoted to understanding what you see. Next, the motor cortex—the part of the brain that directs movement—has to send signals along your spinal cord and to your arm, hand and finger muscles, telling them to respond in the proper sequence to catch the ruler— quick!

That's a lot happening in less than half a second—and a pretty amazing feat! Already a subscriber? Sign in. Thanks for reading Scientific American. Send assessments and training programs to students. Send assessments and training programs to your children or other family members. Send assessments and training programs to research participants. Reaction time or response time refers to the amount of time that takes places between when we perceive something to when we respond to it. It is the ability to detect, process, and respond to a stimulus.

Reaction time depends on various factors: Perception : Seeing, hearing, or feeling a stimulus with certainty is essential to having good reaction time. When the starter shoots the gun at the beginning of a race, the sound is received by the athlete's ears they perceive the stimulus.

Processing : In order to have good reaction time, it's necessary to be focused and understand the information well. Following the previous example, the runners, after hearing the gun, will be able to distinguish the sound from other background noise and know that it is time to start running process the stimulus. Response : Motor agility is necessary in order to be able to act and have good response time. When the runners perceived and correctly processes the signal, they started moving their legs respond to the stimulus.

If any part of these processes is altered, reaction time will be affected as a consequence. In other words, if one of the athletes had poor reaction time, they would have a disadvantage against the other runners. Reaction time necessarily includes a motor component , unlike processing speed. This is why having good reaction time is associated with having good reflexes. In this example, the processes perceive, process, and respond , are done in a matter of milliseconds, but reaction time can vary depending on a variety of factors : Complexity of the stimulus- The more complex the stimulus, the more information that has to be processed, the longer this process will take.

Familiarity, preparation, and expectations : If you have to respond to a known stimulus that you've responded to before, the reaction time will be lower. The less information that you have to process, the quicker the reaction time will be. If, as in the example with the runners, you are expecting the stimulus waiting for the gun , reaction time will be even lower.

State of the organism : Some factors that may negatively affect the detection of the stimulus are fatigue, attention being sleepy , high temperature, old age, or even eating too much food or substances like alcohol or other drugs. All of these factors may negatively affect the detection of the stimulus, processing it, and responding to it. Stimulated sensory modality : Reaction time is shorter when the stimulus that triggers the response is auditory than if it is visual because auditory stimuli require less processing.

Each sensory modality has a different reaction time. Aside from other factors, the type of stimulus that we process also affects reaction time. Simple : There is one single response to a single stimulus. For example, pressing the space bar on the on the computer when a word appears. Choice : There are different responses to different stimuli. For example, pressing the right arrow key if a word appears in Spanish, and pressing the left arrow key if the word appears in another language.

Selection : There are different stimuli, but you only have to respond to one. For example, press the space bar only when the word appears in English. If it appears in Spanish, you don't do anything.

Why is reaction time so important and how does it affect daily life? Good reaction time allows us to be agile and efficient when it comes to responding to stimuli and situations like driving, having a conversation, playing sports, etc. Good response time benefits us in a variety of ways, but it's important that we properly process the information that we receive.

If someone asks you a question in an interview, they will be expecting you to answer quickly and well. The same is true for other examples, like if your car breaks down, or if you have to act on your toes- you will have to respond quickly and accurately. Luckily, reaction time can be trained and improved. Any type of disorder that is characterized by perception, information processing, or motor problems will also affect reaction time. This is why reaction time is so sensitive to alterations.

For example, visual or auditory problems like blindness or hearing impairments may lead to problems that affect reaction time due to the problems with perception. People with bradypsychia or dementia like Alzheimer's Disease may cause poor processing, and thus affect response time. People with inhibition control problems or oeople with ADHD may also have processing speed affected, which in turns affects response time.

When it comes to carrying out the action, people with akinesia or bradykinesia, as is the case with Parkinson's patients, or motor problems like hemiparesia or other paralisies may also have problems when giving a motor response. In general, any neurodegenerative disorder like Alzheimer's, Parkinsons, MS, or Huntington's disease will also find that their reaction time is affected as well. Finally, brain problems caused by brain injury or stroke may affect any of these processes, which affects response time as a consequence.

One disorder that can most affect how quickly you are able to process information is called diffuse axonal injury. This usually happens after suffering from a concussion and the neural connections become damaged. Try new or difficult techniques slowly at first, then gradually increase your speed as you get better at them or feel more comfortable performing them.

This helps your body get used to the feeling of that move or technique so it becomes more natural to perform, even at higher speeds. Find a place where you can practice how quickly you respond to a signal, such as a gunshot or whip crack. This can help you better train your brain to process auditory stimuli and turn them into increasingly automatic physical reactions. You can use numerous online tools to test reaction time, like this one. More and more couples are meeting through online dating, but what about online gaming?

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