Mental chronometry

Mental chronometry is the use of response time in perceptual-motor tasks to infer the content, duration, and temporal sequencing of cognitive operations. Mental chronometry is one of the core paradigms of experimental and cognitive psychology, and has found application in various disciplines including cognitive psychophysiology, cognitive neuroscience, and behavioral neuroscience to elucidate mechanisms underlying cognitive processing.

Mental chronometry is studied using measurements of reaction time (RT), which is the elapsed time between the presentation of a sensory stimulus and the subsequent behavioral response. In psychometric psychology it is considered to be an index of processing speed. That is, it indicates how fast the individual can execute the mental operations needed by the task at hand. In turn, speed of processing is considered an index of processing efficiency. The behavioral response is typically a button press but can also be an eye movement, a vocal response, or some other observable behavior. RT is constrained not only by the speed of signal transmission in white matter, but also by the properties of synaptic and neural processing in cortical gray matters.

Response time is the sum of reaction time and movement time. Usually the focus in research is on reaction time. There are four basic means of measuring it:

Due to momentary attentional lapses, there is a considerable amount of variability in an individual's response time, which does not tend to follow a normal (Gaussian) distribution. To control for this, researchers typically require a subject to perform multiple trials, from which a measure of the 'typical' or baseline response time can be calculated. Taking the mean of the raw response time is rarely an effective method of characterizing the typical response time, and alternative approaches (such as modeling the entire response time distribution) are often more appropriate.

Sir Francis Galton is typically credited as the founder of differential psychology, which seeks to determine and explain the mental differences between individuals. He was the first to use rigorous reaction time tests with the express intention of determining averages and ranges of individual differences in mental and behavioral traits in humans. Galton hypothesized that differences in intelligence would be reflected in variation of sensory discrimination and speed of response to stimuli, and he built various machines to test different measures of this, including reaction time to visual and auditory stimuli. His tests involved a selection of over 10,000 men, women and children from the London public.

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