What's a good reaction time for gaming?
The international literature puts mean simple visual reaction time for a healthy adult at 200–270 ms, with elite athletes and trained esports pros landing in the 180–220 ms range. Anything under 180 ms in simple-RT is exceptional. Go/no-go (where you must withhold a response on certain stimuli) adds 70–100 ms because of the decision step. Stroop (resolving conflicting colour-word information) adds another 200–400 ms. If you click in under 100 ms you anticipated the stimulus — that's a guess, not a reaction, and this tool flags and discards it.
Why is my reaction time worse than online charts say?
Most online reaction tests measure only the click event, but the chain is longer than that: stimulus → eye → optic nerve → visual cortex → motor cortex → finger → mouse switch → USB poll → browser event loop → screen scan. The browser path alone can add 30–80 ms of variance depending on your monitor refresh (see /monitor/refresh), mouse polling (see /mouse/polling), and OS scheduler. Tests on 60 Hz panels read slower than 240 Hz panels even for the same human. Compare yourself only against your own scores on the same hardware.
How does the go/no-go mode work?
Go/no-go presents one of two symbols at a randomised delay. You click only on the 'go' target (green flash); the 'no-go' target (red flash) must be ignored. The mode measures both correct response time and false-alarm rate. It's a closer analogue to FPS gameplay than simple-RT because real combat requires you to decide whether to shoot — not just respond to any stimulus. Trained CS2 and Valorant players typically score 270–320 ms with under 5% false alarms. Hesitation pushes the time up; over-eagerness pushes false alarms up.
What is the Stroop test and why is it relevant?
Stroop measures cognitive interference — you're shown a colour word ('RED') printed in a different ink ('BLUE') and must respond to the ink, not the word. The brain's automatic reading process fights the slower colour-naming process and the conflict costs 200–400 ms. It maps onto FPS situations where what you expect (an enemy peek angle) disagrees with what you see (an off-angle hold). Strong Stroop scores correlate with better target prioritisation in chaotic team-fights. Median score on this tool is 550 ms; under 450 ms is excellent.
Does caffeine actually help reaction time?
Yes, modestly and briefly. Peer-reviewed studies show 80–200 mg caffeine improves simple-RT by 10–30 ms within 30–60 minutes of consumption, peaking at about 90 minutes and fading over 3–4 hours. Higher doses don't keep improving the score and start to hurt fine motor control. Sleep is far more impactful — a single night under 6 hours adds 30–50 ms to simple-RT and 80+ ms to go/no-go. Hydration, screen brightness, and time of day (afternoon peak) also matter more than most performance supplements.
Can reaction time be trained?
Partially. Simple-RT has a hard biological floor around 150 ms (signal travel time through the nervous system) that you cannot beat. What you can train is the variance — pros aren't faster on their best click, they're faster on average because they have fewer slow trials. Daily practice on go/no-go and discrimination tasks reduces standard deviation over 4–8 weeks. Reaction time also degrades with age by roughly 0.5 ms per year after 25. Combine practice with sleep, hydration, and good ergonomics for a realistic 20–40 ms gain.
Why do my five trials vary so much?
Human reaction time is intrinsically noisy. Even on identical hardware your scores will spread across a 50–100 ms range within a single five-trial run. That's why the tool reports the full distribution, not just the mean — the median is a more honest reflection than the average because it discards lucky and unlucky outliers. A tight distribution (under 30 ms spread) means you're consistent; a wide one means you're varying attention or anticipating. Repeat the full battery three or four times before drawing conclusions about your true baseline.
Does monitor refresh rate change my reaction time?
Yes — directly and measurably. On a 60 Hz panel the worst-case wait for the next frame is 16.7 ms; on 240 Hz it's 4.2 ms; on 360 Hz it's 2.8 ms. Averaged across many trials, moving from 60 Hz to 240 Hz cuts roughly 6 ms off measured reaction time without any change in human performance. That's why pro tournaments mandate 240+ Hz monitors. See /monitor/refresh to confirm your actual refresh rate and /gaming/input-lag for the full click-to-photon breakdown.