Attention tasks

Measure your reaction time in five trials

Tap when the box turns green. See your typical and fastest response across five trials.

5 trials
1 min
Free, no sign-up

For the fairest comparison, retake on the same device.

Results on screen · no email

About this test

Press when the colour changes across five valid trials. Results show your median, best and mean response times in milliseconds, plus presses made before or too soon after the change. For reference, a calibrated study of 1,469 adults aged 18 to 65 (Woods and colleagues, 2015) found a mean simple reaction time of 231 milliseconds, and the other large studies in the table below report means from 233 to 328 ms. Your screen and input add their own delay, so compare your median with your own earlier runs on the same device.

How the task works

The box is grey while you wait; after one to four seconds it turns green.
Press Space, Enter or tap the box as fast as you can when it turns green.
Pressing early counts as an anticipation and the trial repeats, and so does a press under 120 milliseconds after the change, which is faster than a reaction can be.
Five valid trials end the task, in well under a minute.

Task accessibility

Time: 1 minute
Length: 5 trials
Result: your times and counts

Your answers stay in this browser tab. If you sign in, you can save your result (not your answers). When session replay is on, it can include visible questions, choices and results. Privacy details.

For context

Typical simple reaction times in published studies

Published research figures for adults, not targets and not a ranking. Each study used its own equipment and method, so set your own figure beside your earlier runs first.

Mean simple visual reaction time in large adult studies, as listed in Table 1 of Woods and colleagues (2015). The studies report means; this page reports the median of your five trials.
Study	Adults	Ages	Mean reaction time
Woods et al. (2015), experiment 1	1,469	18–65	231 ms
Woods et al. (2015), experiment 2	189	18–82	238 ms
Krieg et al. (2001)	4,896	20–59	233 ms
Vincent et al. (2012)	107,413	17–65	261 ms
Deary and Der (2005)	1,930	16–63	328 ms

Why the spread? The same paper notes that computer hardware alone can add up to 100 ms to a measured time, and every screen and input device adds its own. Older adults are slower by a fraction of a millisecond a year, so age explains little of it.

Where these figures come from

Use the result

What this test adds

Results show the median, best and mean of five valid trials. Presses made before the change or within 120 ms are counted as anticipations.

A small next step

Run it twice more at different times of day and compare your medians; the spread is your own baseline noise.

Questions people ask

What does a reaction time test actually measure?

It measures the time from a visible colour change to your press across five valid trials. The screen, browser and input method also affect the timing.

Is it fair to take this on a phone?

It is fair against your own phone and unfair against your own laptop: touchscreens usually add tens of milliseconds over a key press, and screen refresh rates differ again. Take it on one device and compare your runs with each other rather than across devices.

What should I do with the number?

Treat it as a baseline and run it again — twice more, at different times of day, on the same device. The spread between your own runs tells you how much movement is just noise, which is the only thing that makes a later change worth noticing.

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