Choice Reaction Time

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For a reflex, reaction time is the time from the onset of a stimulus until the organism responds.

Types

• Simple reaction time is the time it takes to react to a simple stimuli- or small change in the enviorment.
• Complex reaction time is the latency between a variable stimulus and a respectively variable response.
• Go/NoGo (also called Recognition) reaction time task in which participants respond to one particular event but ignore other events
• Choice reaction time task in which participants respond differentially to two stimuli by pressing one key for event A and a separate key for event B.

Factors

The major factors affecting reaction time are:

• Recognition;
• Choice;
• Number of stimuli;
• Type of stimulus;
• Stimulus intensity;
• Deseases, such as chicken pox;

There are many other factors that can also affect reaction time:

• Practice and error
• Fatigue
• Sex
• Age
• Race (Jensen, 1993)
• Distraction
• Finger Tremors (Brebner and Welford, 1980)
• Left vs. right hand (Dane and Erzurumluoğlu, 2003)
• Vision (Direct vs. Peripheral) (Brebner and Welford, 1980)
• Sobriety
• Breathing Cycle (Buchsbaum and Calloway, 1965)
• Stimulant Drugs (Caffeine) (Lorist and Snel, 1997)
  

History

Arthur Jensen (1979) emphasized a different aspect of information processing speed; specifically, he proposed that intelligence can be understood in terms of speed of neuronal conducting. In other words, the smart person is someone whose neural circuits conduct information rapidly. When Jensen proposed this notion, direct measure of neural-conduction velocity were not readily available, so Jensen primarily studied a proposed proxy for measuring neural processing speed: choice reaction time – the time it takes to select one answer from among several possibilities.

Start Screen

Different Section are made visible to the user where the user sees the information regarding Current Letter, Your Response , Start Button and Stop Button.

Working Screen

When the user clicks on the start button, the Current Letter shows the letter which the user had to press. In the meantime, the timer has been started to note down the user reaction time. When the user clicks the character on the keyboard (whether Correct/Wrong), next letter will appear on the screen and the timer will start again.

The program will note all the response time of all the letters, so that a complete summary screen will be shown to the user.

Summary Screen

When the user ends the program, the program shows the summary window to the user. In the summary window, it shows the user the average time of all the characters.

User also had a option for selecting the response time for different characters, and it also shows the average time for that character.