Serendip is an independent site partnering with faculty at multiple colleges and universities around the world. Happy exploring!

Reply to comment

jingber's picture

Phone Conversation and Reaction Time

                                        Act         Think, Act       Read, Think, Act      Read, Think-Negate, Act
Control                        215, 10        247, 10             343, 48                       369, 83
Talking to my mom      233, 16        318, 50            457, 118                      460, 90
Change in milliseconds    18               71                     114                            91              (Times in milliseconds, followed by SD)
 
I tested if talking to my mother would change the reaction times.  The data shows a time increase for all four experimental set-ups, but to varying degrees.  There was little change in just acting, a larger change when thinking and acting, and even larger changes in the last two set-ups.  This may illustrate the way in which a conversation affects various mental processes.  Language production and comprehension are two of the more complex processes of the mind, so more advanced activities would not get the attention they need for rapid response.  Reading is the hardest to do while talking, because it involves another form of language comprehension (and a less natural one, as writing systems are artificially created, unlike spoken language.)
 
However, the extent to which a phone conversation plays a factor in speed of thinking and reading comprehension may be overstated by the experiment.  The much larger standard devisions mask the data in two ways.  First, a large standard deviation means the data is less precise, so the "true" mean may lie within a larger range.  Secondly, the incrase in standard deviation may be the result of factors that do not relate to thinking speed or reading comprehension.  Talking on the phone decreases the amount of focus on doing the experiment itself, so the subject may be more likely to simply miss the cue when conversing.  This could result in several reaction times being much longer than others.  For the purposes of the experiment, they would be outliers that should not be counted (but were, due to the nature of the set-up) because they are highlighting a change in a confounding variable.  Thus, while there is definitely an increase in reaction time, the extent to which reading comprehension, thinking, and acting were slowed down is unclear.

Reply

To prevent automated spam submissions leave this field empty.
4 + 12 =
Solve this simple math problem and enter the result. E.g. for 1+3, enter 4.