Between ages 18-85, men exhibit faster reaction times to a visual stimulus. Be a part of our research study into brain function at mindcrowd.org

We are interested in better understanding how the brain works and we created a web-based game at mindcrowd.org with the hopes of generating the largest ever scientific study population. This plot illustrates our reaction time data analyzed by the participant’s gender. Each small “dot” represents one individual test taker (over 30,000 of them!) and they are colored with the stereotypical colors for gender. Age in years is denoted on the x-axis and on the y-axis is the median reaction time in milliseconds. The reaction time test has very simple rules – when a figure appears on the screen each test taker is asked to hit the enter key. It directly tests the connections between the test taker’s eyes-brain-finger. This is of general interest to neuroscientists because it is a question of basic connectivity, or neuronal “wiring”, in the body. We are interested in what influences this, and many other features of our brain and nervous system. Note from the data that the genders are separated in reaction time response by an average of approximately 20 milliseconds across the entire studied age spectrum from 18-85 (the lines are the mean response time with the bordering shaded areas reflecting the 95% confidence intervals for the measurement). This suggests that the male and female “wiring system” for this particular task is different. The reason why is a topic for another discussion… in the meantime please come and spend just 10 minutes at our research study site and join the MindCrowd! Visit us at mindcrowd.org and help us spread the word via your social network. Our goal is an ambitious one – to reach 1 million test takers! Help us please!