Psychology Lab Reaction Tests

Psychology Lab Basic Reaction Tests is a free and easy to use Windows app to measure reaction time for visual and auditory stimuli

Psychology Lab Basic Reaction Tests contains auditory and visual simple reaction test and auditory and visual choice reaction test. 

In the tests you press Space bar when you hear a tone signal or see a square on the screen.

Since reaction time are measured in milliseconds it is recommended you close other apps and use your system's internal audio system to minimize disturbances.

You can save your results to text files, which can make it easy to copy to an Excel worksheet, Google spreadsheet or similar to create charts to follow your own progress or use in research.

You can save up to five separate players to follow individual progress.

There is also an option to save to a game style High score table.

Product features

No norms are provided with this software but in the result view there is an option to view the results in a levelled view with a colored bar that roughly indicates average positions. Red at the bottom indicates fast time, green most average time and blue rather slow time. Young adults could tend to be towards green/red area and older adults towards green/blue area. It is important to remember that individual varations can be large and normal. Results on these kind of tests could depend on many factors, being tired, unfocused and what kind of computer system you are running the test on.

Visual reaction time are expected to be somewhat higher than auditory reaction time and choice reaction time are quite higher than simple reaction time.

In choice reaction time there are two types of stimuli presented, one is the target, you should only press space bar when the target stimuli appears. If you press space bar on the wrong stimuli, the result will report that as a false hit. This is illustrated with a little colored bar to the right on the result view, from green bottom to red top. 

For more information about norms and expected response time for visual and auditory stimuli, please refer to online research articles on simple reaction time and choice reaction time.

How to use:

From Startscene, press sign "Choose Test" to choose one of the tests. From there you can choose how many rounds you'd like. 5-20 for simple reaction tests and 8-20 for choice reaction tests. For auditory test it is also recommended that you adjust your volume setting there before starting the test. Too low volume can slow your time, too high volume may annoy and startle you.

From Startscene, click on green Exit button to Quit app.

   After test is done, you are presented with the results. Choose to txt file and/or high score.

  In result view you can choose "levelled view" to view results  lined up against a rough colored bar indicator.