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drichard's picture

For our experiment, we chose

For our experiment, we chose to look at the affect talking, or having a conversation with someone, would affect our reaction and thinking rates on Serendip. Specifically, we called our mothers on the phone. Not only can you not ignore your mom, but we also had to deal with the physical distraction of holding the phone. The first trial was without distraction, the second trail occurred while talking on the phone, and then we recorded a third trial to confirm our results. The trials go in this order: Act, Think and React, Read Think and React, and Read Think Negate and React. We recorded the following data:

Initial Trial:

David: 237, 261, 551, 495

Julia: 253, 328, 638, 526

Talking with Mom:

David: 448, 348, 574, 540

Julia: 380, 382, 525, 517

Follow-up Trial:

David: 250, 336, 489, 387

Julia: 242, 323, 506, 436

The overall trend of this data indicates that while we were having a conversation with our mothers, our reaction time increased greatly, and our first two trials were much slower. However, our thinking time over the trials did not increase proportionally. This leads us to theorize that the brain is able to multi-task mentally, but not mentally-physically. In other words, the brain can think multiple thoughts, but as soon as it needs to manifest any of those thoughts physically, the brain needs to focus on that thought and its corresponding physical action. Thus, the reaction time will increase.

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