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REACTION SPEED
TEST NOW YOUR REACTION TIME
Evaluate your reaction speed with our free set of reaction time tests. Based on cognitive science.
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Test Overview
Methodology
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Data & Research

OVERVIEW

Our Reaction Time Test is a set of tasks that evaluate how fast you are able to respond to a change in stimulus (simple reaction time) or to take decisions (complex reaction time). As a cognitive ability, it enjoys very strong scientific backing and has been widely used in cognitive testing for decades.

Reaction Speed is a broad and highly relevant ability of our cognition (also called intelligence) under the most accepted and statistically valid model of intelligence, the CHC model. It has been widely proven to correlate strongly with brain health and to a lesser degree with global capabilities.

CURRENT TEST DATA

Live Data
Average Simple
Reaction Time (ms.)
205 ms.
Average Simple
Reaction Misshits
2
Latest
Sample Size
10K

MAIN TEST CHARACTERISTICS

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Six tasks:
from simple to complex
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Average duration of
3 minutes per task
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Tasks check growing complex reaction times
Key Test Attributes
Type: Online | Individual | Untimed
The test is performed online by a single person and screen instructions. There is no maximum time.
Age: 18+
The test can be also done under the age of 18 but results are normed with an adult population.
Geography: All
Languages: All

The full Reaction Time test is made up of six subtests or tasks that broadly cover the full spectrum of this broad ability. Most of these tasks are very short, so you can probably do all of them in one shot.

You just need a calm space, where you can be highly focused. Each task first presents the instructions, then the testing phase starts, and finally the results are presented quite immediately after each one of the tasks. You might actually continue the tasks in another day if necessary as the system will remember it.

Although you can do the test both with desktop computers and mobile or table devices, we do recommend using a computer. The reason is that touchscreens in general are not as precise as using the mouse. In any case, you may repeat the test as many times as you want, and you will be able to track the evolution of your results and the average result. This average result will be highly reliable.

The test currently is mainly targeted at adults, but under-age kids can also take it if they want, as well as older people. Keep in mind however that reaction times do vary by age and the results are computed against a global datase mainly comprised of adults.

Since our test is available in all countries and in more than 40+ languages, we can say that it has a very diverse sample. Of course, segmentation of those results by country and also by age could be useful, but it could potentially make the results less precise if the sample size is low and could also become computationally expensive for us. Since our test norming is dynamic, we compare you with a sample size made up of the results of everyone that took the test, which as time passes will become a quite large sample.

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TEST JOURNEY

The Reaction Time Test is made up of six (6) subtests, also called tasks. At the end of each task, you will receive your results. The test journey is very easy-to-follow and strives to give you a really broad overview of your reaction speed skills in a fun but scientific manner.

You start with basic tasks like responding to the appearance of simple stimuli, then fearful and calm stimulus. Later on you advance to progressively complex tasks that entail making decisions as fast as possible, and in some cases even inhibiting responses when indicated.
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2
3
4
5
6
Simple
2 min.
Fear
2 min.
Calm
2 min.
Inhibition
3 min.
Complex choice
4 min.
Complex Inhibition
5 min.
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TEST ABILITY HIERARCHY

From a formal scientific point of view, the broad ability of reaction time is commonly split in two narrow abilities, simple (just reacting to the appearance of a stimulus) and complex (making choices). Both behave differently and are correlated with IQ in a different way.

Comparing both, we can affirm that complex reaction time is the better predictor of global intelligence (IQ). Studies have found correlations between complex reaction time and IQ of approx. 40%. While simple reaction times have been found to have a smaller correlation of 20%. In general simple reaction times stay pretty much the same across the adult lifespan, while the complex reaction time starts decreasing soon and progressively as someone ages.

It is important to note that both have a moderate albeit significant relationship with IQ. However, perhaps more importantly, they are a highly relevant indicators of brain disease when they start to seriously deteriorate, so they constitute very important health markers.
Level I: Factor g
Level II: Broad Ability
Global IQ
r = 0.4
Complex Reaction Time

TEST PSYCHOMETRICS

SAMPLE SIZE:
VERY BIG
RELIABILITY:
LOW
VALIDITY:
HIGH
Reaction time tests in general have a low to medium reliability in comparison with other cognitive tasks. This, as we explain in our article, happens because many factors affect reaction time, from concentration, to energy levels, or current mood. Our test, obviously also suffers from this problem. However, if you perform all tasks and even repeat them, you can get a very good estimate.

Thanks to our massive online data set, the sample size is huge, which introduces a lot of power to the analysis that are run in order to compute your results.

Lastly, it is important to mention that these tasks are highly valid in terms of evaluating the reaction speed of a person and are very similar to other tasks performed by scientists around the world.
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The methodology of our Reaction Time Test

TEST DESIGN
  • We have three different simple reaction time tests. The first one uses green rectangles, while the second and third use animals that elicit fear or calmness.
  • Our complex tasks cover inhibition and decision, with stimulus ranging from illustrations of animals and places, to symbols.
  • Each task has a set of questions with two phases: (1) waiting, (2) reaction. Reaction during the wait phase leads to a penalizing misshit. If a maximum time is surpassed, a cap time is used.
Image of a child looking a map
Image of an exam
TEST ANALYSIS & RESULTS
  • Online testing of reaction time is challenging. We use highly efficient Javascript and timing mechanisms to be as accurate as possible. However, as we have not implemented userAgent and mouse/touchscreen segmentation, the test suffers a small degree of measurement error.
  • The norms of each reaction time task are computed dynamically and separately, which means that as time passes by, we gather more data and they become more robust.
  • You may check in our live data section at the top of the page our last data. Bear in mind that this norm recomputation is currently done once per day.
  • In terms of scale, our computations employ a 16x + 100 scale to find your task IQ. And we do so with strong confidence levels of 95%, and with a one-tailed test.
Relevant Sources:
ARTICLE

What is reaction time and how do tests measure it?

Reaction speed is one of the oldest experimented abilities of cognition and intelligence. There is a lot of research about sex differences and age evolution. Since it is a great health indicator, you might enjoy reading about its importance in our article.
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"...online (reaction time) studies might well be adequate across a large number of domains, except where the utmost precision is required, or where absolute response times must be compared between individuals..."
- David Bridges, University of Nottingham
Bridges, A., et al. (2020). The timing mega-study: Comparing a range of experiment generators, both lab-based and online

Frequent Questions (FAQ)

Some of the most common questions about our reaction time test
Does internet speed affect my result?
Not at all. The timing stamps are performed completely within your computer or mobile device (to be precise, in your browser).

Once the task is finished and all reaction times have been registered, the application sends the answer timings to our servers for the final computation of results.
Does my mouse or screen affect my speed?
Yes, there is a reasonable variance from mouse and screen. We would like to make segmented computations in the future to account for this, but it is costly. In general, mouses are a bit faster than touching a screen, and gaming mouses are a bit faster than normal ones (about 8 ms.). The effect is not huge however.

Screens matter too. Some refresh very frequently while others do not. We want also to account for this in the future. In any case we have made our best technically to minimize this effect. And we think it is quite small.

We make users happy with awesome psychological software. We try hard every day.

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SATISFACTION
Trustpilot Review by Missfitz, June 29, 2023
"Not what I expected!

Found it incredibly tricky and doubted my logic, but did surprisingly well. When reading the full report had a full on facepalm as the answers I'd got wrong were totally obvious️.

Interesting, but I do find the charge for the certificate and answers a little bit steep - however it utterly hooked in to my dogged determination to understand where I'd gone wrong 😂"
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RESEARCH | SCIENCE

Cognitive open science thanks to excellent partners

OPEN SCIENCE & RESEARCH
BrainTesting is committed to fostering Open Science. Our tenet is making our cognitive testing data available (to the maximum extent possible), through state-of-the-art analtyical systems in order to help the advancement of science, while preserving our users' privacy rights and a consent-oriented system.

We are working towards systems that will allow us to share the data publicly at scale. In the meantime, any research or scientist interested in studying our dataset, can contact our team to explore potential avenues of collaboration in the short-term.
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COMPLIANCE
Operating with strong Security & Privacy standards
Our reaction time testing software follows the most important security & privacy standards. We use industry-wide adopted security methods to protect all data with our partner Cloudflare. 



At the same time, we have strong privacy protocols that comply with the most protective privacy regulation in the world, the EU GDPR legsilation. You can exercise your rights any time contacting us.