Science Buddies: "Ask an Expert"

Just wondering if this is a good enough topic:

What variables affect human reaction time?

We(me and my partner) were thinking of using cell phones mostly as the variables, maybe music. Any critques, sources, or any kind of help is grealty appreciated. Thanks!

Oh and we're in 10th grade

-Nick

ngarson wrote:Just wondering if this is a good enough topic:

What variables affect human reaction time?

We(me and my partner) were thinking of using cell phones mostly as the variables, maybe music. Any critques, sources, or any kind of help is grealty appreciated. Thanks!

Oh and we're in 10th grade

-Nick

Hi, ngarson!

I think a study of how variables affect human reaction time is a very interesting and useful topic. For a science fair project, I would say that your project should focus on studying whether certain things affect reaction time. What I mean by this is that the proposed title, "What variables affect human reaction time?" is much too broad. You can't possibly hope to discover all the possible things out there that affect reaction time in the context of a single experiment.

The good news is that it sounds like you are already thinking about how to limit the scope of your experiment to how cell phones or music affect reaction times.

The bottom line is, YES, this sounds like an excellent potential project for a science fair.

Best wishes for success.

I agree that your question will need to be narrowed in order to gather good data to answer it. With a narrow question, it will also be easier to form a hypothesis (for example, "Talking on a cell phone will lower your reaction time" or "Listening to music will increase your reaction time."). I might suggest that you focus on either listening to music or talking on cell phones and see how those variables influence your subjects' reaction times.

Have you thought about what task you will have your subjects do and how you are going to measure their reaction time?

Sonia

You might find some interesting background information by searching for recent science news about how talking on a cell phone diminishes reaction time when driving.
I agree that it's an interesting topic and you will be able to do a nice experiment once you narrow it down. And remember your background research can be a little broader and include information on the topics you not decide to experiment on.

well to do this experiment, you would have to bring in a very large test group and make the group very different. This means that you would have to bring in a whole lot of people who are very different than each other. While this is interesting, do not limit the research to just you and your partner-that would make the research very biased.

Hi!
I definitely agree that you and your partner should choose either cell phones or music. Incorporating some basic statistics concepts would be extremely helpful as well, especially in determining how large a sample you would like to take. You can also roughly determine how much bias you will get in the experiment by varying the amount of people (the more people, the less bias, the more accurate the results) I would also suggest you minimize the effect of lurking variables, which would mean that you want to have a variety of people in your experiment group to make sure that these people do not all share the same characteristics (which would throw off your results). Hope this helped, good luck!