Instead of building a rough version out of presentation slides, spreadsheets, and mild desperation, Reaction Time Lab gives you a proper browser-based setup with Free Play for quick exploration and Project Mode for participant instructions, practice trials, condition labels, and export-ready CSV data.

What’s Included

Simple Reaction Time measures basic response speed. Participants respond as quickly as possible when the target appears, making it useful for straightforward response speed comparisons and simple condition effects.

Go / No-Go adds inhibitory control. Participants respond to one stimulus and withhold response to another, making it useful for attention, impulse control, and response inhibition work.

Stroop measures interference and selective attention. Participants respond to ink colour rather than word meaning, which lets you compare congruent and incongruent trials and calculate interference cost without having to build the task yourself from scratch.

Dot Comparison is a perceptual decision task. Participants judge which side contains more dots, making it useful for simple decision-making designs, response mapping work, and quick left-right comparison tasks.

Why Use Reaction Time Lab

Reaction Time Lab is built for the point where theory is no longer enough and you actually need to run something. It gives students and tutors a practical way to work with classic cognitive tasks without needing specialist lab software or a great deal of patience.

It is useful because it does not just produce one vague final score. It gives you trial-by-trial CSV data that you can sort, compare, and use in actual coursework or teaching. That means reaction time studies stop being something students only describe in theory and start becoming something they can run, export, and interpret properly.

It also helps that the structure is consistent. Once you understand how one task works, the others are easy to pick up. Which is a small mercy when everything else in a methods class is already trying to be difficult.

Who It’s For

Reaction Time Lab is well suited to psychology undergraduates, sixth form and college teaching, university seminars, revision sessions, classroom demonstrations, and small student research projects. It works especially well for people who want practical reaction time tasks they can actually run, rather than just reading about Stroop and Go / No-Go for the fifth time and pretending that counts as hands-on work.

It is also useful for tutors and lecturers who want something cleaner than improvised practicals, and for students who need exportable data they can actually use in a write-up.

How It Works

The lab runs in the browser. You choose a task, use Free Play if you want a quick run-through, or switch to Project Mode if you want participant instructions, practice trials, condition labels, and downloadable CSV results.

That means it works well both as a teaching tool and as a small research tool. You can demonstrate a Stroop effect in class, run a simple Go / No-Go comparison for coursework, or test a basic reaction time idea without spending more time building the task than using it.

What You Can Use It For

Reaction Time Lab works well for reaction time experiments, Stroop task studies, Go / No-Go research, selective attention teaching, inhibitory control demonstrations, and simple decision-making tasks.

Common introductory designs include:
caffeine versus no caffeine on Simple Reaction Time,
morning versus evening on Stroop interference,
music versus silence on Go / No-Go accuracy,
and response mapping differences on Dot Comparison.

It is especially useful for undergraduate methods work because the tasks are familiar, the design options are manageable, and the exported data is detailed enough to be useful without becoming a spreadsheet-based punishment.

What Your Download Includes

Each task produces trial-by-trial CSV data rather than one flattened final score. That means students can look at reaction times, accuracy, error types, commission errors, omission errors, congruent versus incongruent trials, interference cost, and response mapping depending on the task they used.

The product page also includes guidance on how to interpret the download, so students are not left squinting at the CSV as if it has personally let them down.

A Quick Note on Precision

Reaction Time Lab is designed for teaching, demos, exploratory work, and introductory student research. It is useful, clean, and much easier to work with than building these tasks manually, but it is not intended to replace specialist experimental software in high-precision lab settings.

Very well suited to undergraduate work. For advanced lab precision, that is usually where the software gets more expensive, the setup gets fussier, and everyone starts speaking in refresh rates.

Why It’s Worth Having

If you need one clean tool for classic reaction time and cognitive control tasks, this does the job properly. It is straightforward to run, easy to understand, and detailed enough to produce data that students can actually work with.

That is a better arrangement than spending hours building a shaky version yourself and then discovering the method section has somehow become a confession.