Science Buddies: "Ask an Expert"

Hi. I'm doing the Where's Waldo project found here on Science Buddies. When it talks about calculating the Mean Reaction time, what is the measurement of time that they're using? When I do my presentation and tell people that the mean reaction time for when targets were present is...580...580 WHAT? I don't know what this is measuring. I have all the numbers and averages, but I don't know what the average is of. Since the program from Cognitive Science (java program) calculates the time within the program and then I average them out, I don't know what measurement of time they are saying the average is of? Can you help me understand this? Thanks

The time readings are in milliseconds (ms). This fact was difficult to find and I consider that a failure of the software. I suspected it was milliseconds but wanted to make sure so i went to the Cognitive Science website http://cognitrn.psych.indiana.edu/Cogsc ... ualSearch/

At the bottom of the page on the left you will see a link for a Tutorial. Click that and you will get a pdf with pages of information about the software. Go to page 7 and look at the graph. You will see that the y-axis has the reaction times and below the axis label there is (ms)

If you have any more questions, let us know.

Sybee