How Quick are you?

How fast is your reaction time?

Let's see!

After you click on the gold button, below, a magenta pentagon will flash very briefly, and a timer will start counting milliseconds. Click the button a second time the instant you see the flashing stimulus. This will stop the timer and measure your reaction time. Get the hang of it by trying a few times, hitting the "Reset" button to reset the counter. After practicing to get your times as low as you can, jot down and average your scores over 5 trials to get a rough idea of your typical reaction time.

If you encounter any problems (some browsers are finicky) simply hit the page refresh of your browser.

A few caveats before you check out your score. Your computer, browser, operating system and Internet service provider may be slowing you down. Traffic to the server could also affect times. Also, the brightness of your monitor might influence your reaction times: the dimmer the image, the slower your reaction because dim images travel to the brain slower than bright images.

Above, are typical reaction times, averaged for both sexes (women are actually a little swifter than men). If the correlation between reaction time and intelligence is valid, then how you perform on this reaction time test could indicate whether you are above or below average intelligence. I have adjusted the reaction times to compensate for the delays specific to this particular application, so they are longer than many published results.

Don't be concerned if your scores weren't great, because the reaction time/intelligence correlation coefficient is not very high (around .2, or only 4% of variance in intelligence accounted for), and lots of technical variables might have slowed you down! I scored exactly average (321 millisecond) for my age group, so you are in good company if you are not as fast as you'd like to be. :)