4 ms·

> Reaction time reflects a person's mental processing speed, and so is considered an indication of general intelligence. I reject this premise.

• svenkat 12y ago
  >> Reaction time reflects a person's mental processing speed, and so is considered an indication of general intelligence. This is so fallacious it hurts. I guess people who play CoD, StarCraft and other reaction-intensive games are the smartest people on the planet.
• dragonwriter 12y ago
  The premise you (rightly) reject is misreported -- the actual reason reaction time is being used as a proxy for IQ is that it has been established to have a correlation with IQ, not for the stupid reason reported in the HuffPo article. (Its like whoever wrote that article didn't even read the abstract of the paper its about.) OTOH, I'm not convinced there is enough of an understanding of that correlation (particularly an understanding of what other factors contribute to reaction time variations and how they have varied over the time in question) to simply assume that it can be treated as invariant in conditions other than those in which the correlation has been studied.
  • lutusp 12y ago
    An argument against the significance of the correlation is that old people's reaction times decline, while their intelligence may continue to increase. Consequently a test that measured abilities other than reaction time would favor that age group over a test series based on reaction time.
• deleted 12y ago
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