ISSN:
1432-0770
Source:
Springer Online Journal Archives 1860-2000
Topics:
Biology
,
Computer Science
,
Physics
Notes:
Summary An apparatus consisting of (a) a small computer, (b) an oscilloscope light-dot controlled by it, and (c) a pencil-shaped peg containing three accelerometers, which are sampled at 150μsec intervals by the computer, has been used to measure simple reaction time for human hand-movement. The stimulus, a jump of the light dot, was presented without a warning signal in series of 100 jumps either after a fixed period or a random time. The average interstimulus interval (ISI) was between 1.3 and 15.8 sec. For every parameter set 1,000 reaction times (RTs) were accumulated during 10 different days. The main results are: (a) RT increases with increasing mean ISI; (b) RT is longer for random ISIs than for constant ones; (c) RT increases slightly with time accumulating during runs; (d) within a series of random ISIs, RT is neither depending on the value of the last ISI before reaction nor on that of the last but one; (e) the probability distribution of RTs has a standard deviation increasing with mean ISI and from periodic to random ISI, and a non-negligible, roughly constant skewness.
Type of Medium:
Electronic Resource
URL:
http://dx.doi.org/10.1007/BF00289405
