Science Buddies: "Ask an Expert"

My project is: Does a Cell-Phone Conversation Affect Reaction Time? What would be the independent variable in this experiment? Would it be the different conversation topics or the auditory stimuli? If it is the auditory stimuli how would I measure that?

Hi,

The independent variable is the part of the experiment that you set up to achieve some effect. The effect that you measure is the dependent variable because it 'depends' on the conditions that you set up.

From reading your post, I think you are trying to measure how much talking on the phone can distract a person from accurately performing a task. The topic or topics of conversation and whether the subject does most of the talking or is listening more often are the factors of the independent variable that you have to control. Deciding on how to have a 'conversation' and how to equalize the degree of distraction for multiple subjects is going to be tough. I would suggest doing some online searching to see if someone has done something like this and see how they conducted the experiment.

As to what exactly you can measure, that seems fairly easy. You could have someone play a simple video game for a few minutes or do one of the Lumosity games. The latter are good because they give a score that you can easily use to compare the subjects' performance during a phone conversation with their performance without distraction. Subjects will have to have use of their hands during the test, so you would have to put the phone on speaker.

Is this what you had in mind? Let us know what you plan to do and we can make suggestions.

Good luck,

Sybee

Hello there,

I agree with SciB and I think she gave you some excellent advice. I would like to add that Science Buddies has a wonderful page explaining how to determine the independent and dependent variables in your experiments. You should check out this link--I think it will be very helpful for you, if not for this experiment, then definitely for future experiments where you have to figure out the variables: https://www.sciencebuddies.org/science- ... evariables.

Let us know if you have anymore questions!

Connie

Hi -
In my biology class I often did do class labs to test reaction times.
There is an experiment called the 'ruler'drop' - you can look that up.

Or you can try this one : it's on line and the subject's reaction time is recorded as he/she performs the test -

Your control is with NO distraction and the experimental group is WITH a distraction that you determine - conversation, etc..

http://getyourwebsitehere.com/jswb/rttest01.html

You will need to collect data from many subjects - all the same sex, age, etc. and have them perform your reaction time test with no distraction -
Then figure out what a good distraction is (conversation? listening to people talking?) and have the same subjects perform the same reaction time tests.
This should provide you with some very interesting data that you can apply to driving a car and talking on a cell phone.

Good luck!