Reaction Time Test

How to play

This reaction time test is a single measurement with no levels, and it’s usually over in well under a minute. You react to one thing, a color change, and the game keeps the median of five clean reps.

1. Tap the pad that says Tap to start. It turns blue and reads Wait for green… Keep your thumb still.
2. After a random pause of 1 to 3 seconds, the pad turns green and shows a lightning bolt and TAP! Tap anywhere on it as fast as you can. Your time is taken the moment your thumb touches the screen.
3. Your time for that rep appears in milliseconds. The next rep starts on its own a second later, or tap the pad to go straight away.
4. Tapped while it was still blue? The pad turns red, you’ll see Too soon! and that rep is redone. A tap less than 100 ms after green counts as a false start too, because at that speed you guessed rather than reacted.
5. Took longer than 1.5 seconds? You’ll see Too slow, again. That counts as a lapse of attention and the rep is redone, so one glance at a notification can’t wreck the whole run.
6. Five dots at the top fill in as you go. After five valid reps, the median is your score, and your fastest of the five is shown just below it. If you jump the gun five or more times, the run won’t count as a record. Shake it off and go again.

Reaction Time has one mode, Test mode, so every run is comparable with the last. If you switch on Large text & slower pace in Settings, the random wait gets half a second longer.

What the reaction time test measures

This is simple reaction time: one signal, one possible response, and the time between them. Three steps fit inside that number: your eyes notice the change, your brain decides to go, and your thumb moves. A fourth thing sneaks in as well: the delay of your screen, touch sensor and browser.

Researchers have used simple reaction tasks for decades because they’re short and easy to repeat. The Deary–Liewald task, for example, waits a random 1 to 3 seconds before each signal so nobody can settle into a rhythm. Brainsquat copies that idea. A large UK study of 7,130 adults used simple and choice reaction tasks to see how speed changes with age (Der & Deary, 2006).

Honest limits:

• It measures one narrow skill. A fast median says nothing about your memory, focus or problem solving.
• The number includes device delay, so results from different phones or browsers aren’t directly comparable.
• It’s a game record, not a medical test or an IQ test.
• Practice will likely lower your time on this game. A major review of brain-training research found that trained tasks improve, while evidence for gains on unrelated tasks or in daily life is thin (Simons et al., 2016).

Average reaction time and ranges

We haven’t found a published norm for a phone-based test like this one. So instead of inventing an “average for your age,” here is what the most-quoted numbers actually measured:

How to read the table:

• Phones read slower. Touch delay alone was about 58 to 70 ms in lab tests, while desktop setups add around 30 ms. A phone score above Human Benchmark’s 273 ms is normal and doesn’t mean you’re slow.
• The peer band is coarse on purpose. After a valid run, the result screen shows a band such as “Top 20–30% of players” instead of an exact percentile. With tens of milliseconds of device noise, decimals would be fake precision. The reference curve is an estimate built from desktop data, not a measured phone norm.
• Your own trend is the number to trust. On the same phone, device delay barely changes from run to run (Pronk et al. measured a standard deviation of about 7 ms). Your personal record on one phone is the fairest comparison you have.