Online experiment on reaction time

For this assignment, you will participate in an online experiment on reaction time located in the Course Resources section in the Psychology Learning Tools. Once you have completed the experiment you will analyze data and write a lab report (7-10 pages) in APA style consisting of the following sections:

The following variables are included in the data file for 160 participants:

• Gender (categorical; 2 groups [male and female])
• Age (continuous; range of 17 to 58 years)
• Time in Experiment (continuous; total number of seconds for three tasks)
• 3 reaction times (all continuous – average scores for the Simple, Go/No Go, Choice tasks)
• Variable 1 (categorical; 3 groups)
• Variable 2 (continuous; range of 46 to 121)

Your hypothesis and topic determine what you choose to analyze and report on in your research report. We are starting our research NOW by developing a hypothesis to use in your study.

Starting thinking about: What could affect reaction time? How would you set up a study using at least one of the reaction time tasks? You could be interested in

• reaction time and age, so you analyze a reaction task and the age variables;
• gender differences, or even gender by age differences; or
• something new, such as if the participant was an athlete or not, or how many drinks the participant had prior to doing the lab.

Variable 1 and Variable 2 are set up for you to use as new variables. If we continue with the athleticism topic:

• Variable 1 is categorical, so it could be coded as 0 is no physical activity, 1 is moderate activity, and 2 is intense activity to assess group differences in reaction time.
• Variable 2 is a continuous variable, so it could be used to represent the number of minutes each person exercises each day to determine if exercise correlates with reaction time.

My research topic will be whether or not gender correlates to visual reaction time. It is hypothesized that the reaction time will be faster for males than females, because men are generally more senstive to stimulus.