Average Reaction Time by Age

Here is the method, stated so you can disagree with it. We started from the percentiles published for simple visual reaction time in large adult samples. Those same studies report how the figures shift with age, so the age pattern comes from the same place.

Then we added a fixed amount to every band. That covers the screen and input lag a browser test carries and laboratory equipment does not.

So two things follow. The order of the bands and the gaps between them are meaningful. The actual numbers could be out by tens of milliseconds, because your monitor and your mouse are not in the model.

Our own published sample size is zero. Collection began at launch, and no figure taken from it appears anywhere on this site yet.

The slowing is not mostly in your muscles or your nerves. Signals do travel a little slower along nerves as you age, but only a little. Reaction times fall off far more than that can explain.

Most of the change is in how fast the brain works, and, just as importantly, in caution. Older adults tend to trade speed for accuracy. They jump the gun less often, and they come out slower on average as a result.

When studies measure that choice separately, a large slice of the age gap turns out to be caution rather than capacity.

The age effect is about twice as steep on tasks with a decision in them. A four-choice task makes you work out which signal appeared and pick the matching key. That step is where the clearest age change shows up. It is why ageing researchers prefer choice tasks to simple ones.

You can see this on yourself in about six minutes. Take the reaction time test, then the choice reaction time test, and note the gap. That gap, rather than either raw score, is what changes most across a lifetime.

It cannot tell you whether your own reaction time is normal for you, because it has no idea what your equipment adds. Put one person on a 60 Hz office monitor with a cheap mouse. Put the same person on a 144 Hz gaming setup. The first reading comes out about 40 ms slower.

It cannot estimate anyone's age from their score, and it says nothing about any individual's brain health. Age explains only a small part of the difference between people. The spread inside any one band is far wider than the gap between bands. That is the most important line on this page, and the one most age charts leave out.

Compare yourself against your own earlier scores on the same machine first. Use the band only as a rough sanity check. What counts as a good reaction time makes the fuller case for why one number is a weak summary of anything.

Corrections and challenges to these figures are welcome, and we publish them. The method above is deliberately specific enough to attack.