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Re: Human Reaction Time

At 08:30 PM 1/19/00 -0500, you wrote:
We just did the drop/catch meter stick experiment and found human reaction
time to be 0.21 s with a standard deviation of 0.05 s. I searched the
internet and found a reference that matched the mean closely, but could not
find a reference for the standard deviation. What have others found for this
experiment?
...

Bob Carlson


I would do this every year with every class on the way to establishing the
need for instuments to aid our senses and specifically why we would not be
using stopwatches. We would graph these for each class and for the
accumulation of classes and talk about the various measures of central
tendency. The findings do not seem to depend very much on the choce of
signal instrumentation used in the lab experiment itself. You report "human
reaction time" and I read this as "human eye to hand reaction time" and I
agree with your results. I have found the "eye to foot reaction time" to be
twice that value. Then we would talk about finger to brain distance
compared with foot to brain distance and student driving habits.

Tom Ford
The Science Source
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