❌ 7. Required Practical: Measuring Reaction Times (B10) Flashcards
What is the Aim of this Practical
The aim of this experiment is to understand factors that could affect the reaction time of a person, such as drugs, lack of sleep and distractions, through the use of a reaction strip.
My Hypothesis for this Practical
The aim of this experiment is to understand factors that could affect the reaction time of a person, such as drugs, lack of sleep and distractions, through the use of a reaction strip. Also, distracting stimuli like music will increase the reaction time.
Health and Safety for this Practical
- Do not consume drinks in the laboratory
- The experiment should be conducted in a non-laboratory environment
- Drinking high amounts of caffine can be dangerous/harmful for teenagers
Method for this Practical
- Work with a partner
- Person A holds out their hand with a gap between their thumb and first finger.
- Person B holds the ruler with the zero at the top of person A’s thumb
- Person B drops the ruler without telling Person A and they must catch it.
- You can test how reaction time is affected by doing 5 where your not distracted,
and another 5 when you are distracted (e.g when music is being played or when your under the influence of drugs, e.g caffeine - The number level with the top of person A’s thumb is recorded in a suitable table.
- Repeat this ten times.
- Swap places, and record another ten attempts.
- You can use the conversion table to help convert your ruler measurements into reaction time or just record the catch distance in cm.
What is the Independant Variable in this Practical
The Independant Variable in this experiment is weather/how the person is being distracted. (This includes whether they have consumed caffeine, listening to music, or just concentrating normally). This is because it is the variable that this changed and altered to affect the dependant variable in this test.
What is the Dependant Variable in this Practical
The Dependent Variable in this experiment is the Reaction Time. This is the dependant variable because it is the variable that is being tested/measured in this experiment.
What is the Control Variables in this Practical
The Control Variables in this experiment are the person dropping, the person reacting, using the same meter ruler/reaction ruler, and the height of the drop. These are control variables because they have to stay the same throughout the experiment to ensure that it is kept as a fair test.
Why is each factor tested more than once in this Experiment
For the Results Table, each factor is tested more than once - up to five times - to ensure that no anomalies occur in the experiement, and to confirm that your results are as reliable as possible. Also you can obtain an average which gives your results more accuracy
What Is The Best Graph To Use And How To Set It Out
The best graph that can be used to display this data is simply a bar chart. The X-Axis should include the Distraction Type, while the Y-Axis should contain the Reaction Time as shown in the table. This method/graph will give you the clearest results when comparing how each factor may affect your reaction times.
Conclusion for this Practical (How do the Results relate to the Hypothesis)
Overall, our results were inconsistent with our hypothesis, as the results did not change as much as we thought! There were minor improvements with music and a minor reduction if reaction time with caffeine compared, to the results of the control reaction time, but all in all there are some noticeable changes. Interestingly, the music did not have much of an effect on the results. The precision of most of the results was fairly good, and there were no anomalous results that stood out. In summary, you’d expect the caffeine to have a positive impact on reactions as you’re senses are stimulated and heightened, while you’d expect music to generally have a worse imapct on reaction times if you were to intially test them in a quiet room beforehand.
Evaluation of this Practical (What potential flaws are there, how can they be improved to get more reliable results)
Generally, the method that we followed was accurate, however external factors exposed some flaws in the method.
However, a potential flaw is that the room that we conducted the practical in was loud and noisy, so that could have affected the results. Also, students were able to pick their own music, so in some scenarios this could’ve benefitted them as they could’ve ended up being focused by listening to their favourite tunes rather than hearing all the loud background noise (and even in some cases, the earphones would’ve cancelled out more noise from the rest of the room than they were giving out in music).
Another factor that could have affected the results was the time taken between consuming the caffeine and conducting the experiment. This would have an effect as it takes different amounts of time for the caffeine to take effect depending on the dosage.
How Can You Improve Accuracy And Precision In Your Results
In a set of measurements, accuracy is closeness of the measurements to a specific value, while precision is the closeness of the measurements to each other. So in knowing this, the results we obtained fairly accurate, but not too precise, as it would usually be the music that slightly increases your reaction time on average, and an intake of a caffeine after a fair few minutes would usually lower them as a result of this.
