Reaction Time Lab PDF

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Summary

Reaction Time, characteristics of life Lab...

Description

What Factors Affect your Reaction Time? Research Question: All living things respond to stimuli. Reflexes are a response to stimuli. In this activity, we will determine who has faster reflexes, high school boys, or high school girls? Background: Reaction time is the time between a stimulus and your response. Your nervous system processes stimulus and the amount of time between the stimulus and your response is your reaction time. The Dutch Physiologist F.C. Donders was the first person to experiment with human reaction times in 1865. Before Donder’s experiment took place, scientists were under the impression that the human reaction was too quick to be measured. Donders conducted his experiment by giving small electric shocks on the feet of his test subjects who pressed a telegraph key with their right hand when they felt the shock to their right foot and with their left hand when they felt a shock on there left foot. For one of his experiments he used two different test groups, he notified one of the groups before the experiment. The group that knew in advance was 1/15th of a second faster with their reactions. (http://tomperera.com/psychology_museum/mrt.htm).

Hypothesis: The time it takes you to react to a particular situation depends on many factors, including stimulus and the particular part of the body that is to react. Various historical experiments (including the Donders) indicate that the sense of sight is the slowest to react, followed by touch and then hearing ( Doesschate, 1963/1964). I predict that high school boys will have faster reflexes. If high school boys have faster reflexes, then their reaction times will be faster than high school girls because they grew up playing sports and therefore were forced to develop faster reflexes earlier in life. Variables Independent (MIX)

Dependent Variable (DRY)

Controls

Gender

Reaction Time

Pitcher, Clicking your mouse

Experimental Design

Materials ● Computer ● High School Boys and Girls ● Data Table Procedure 1. Logon to h  ttps://www.exploratorium.edu/baseball/activities/fastball-reaction.html 2. Complete three attempts 3. Select the best of the three and record in the shared data table. 4. Find the girls’ meantime. 5. Find the boys’ meantime. 6. Graph the data. 7. From a conclusion based on the data.

Data Table

Conclusion: In paragraph format, discuss the following talking points: Based on the results of this experiment my hypothesis, that boys would be faster than girls because they grew up being given lots of athletic opportunities growing up and therefore had to develop fast reflexes at an early age, was proven correct. You can see in the data table that the meantime for boys was 0.24 and for the girls 0.26 making the boys 0.02 seconds faster than the girls. The three variables that comprise reaction time are the type of stimulus, gender. The three varibles that comprise reaction time are the type of stimulus, age and gender in this experiement gender was specifically focused on because the results of those who identify as male vs. female was what we were collecting data on. Along with the sense being stimulated which in this experiment is sight. Age was slightly affected because there are a couple of grades involved in the experiment ( Reaction Times ). Overall as much as boys were faster then the girls, it was only by 2/100 of a second and therefore is probably not based around gender.

Evaluation

What went wrong?

To what extent did it affect

How could it be improved?

(discuss possible error in collection of data, what further work could be done to investigate this question more fully?

results?

Possible error is the wide age range along with whether the student was using a mouse or a touchscreen.

I don’t think this affected the results very heavily.

It would better if all were the same age and using the same type of device.

References G. ten Doesschate (1963/64). Notes on the History of Reaction-Time Measurements. Philips Technical Review, volume 25, pages 75-80. (n.d.). Retrieved from http://tomperera.com/psychology_museum/mrt.htm Woods, D. L., Wyma, J. M., Yund, E. W., Herron, T. J., & Reed, B. (2015, March 26). Factors influencing the latency of simple reaction time. Retrieved September 19, 2020, from https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4374455/...