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Reaction Time by Age: What the Research Shows

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If your teenage cousin keeps beating you at this game, age is probably part of the reason. A smaller part than you'd think, though. The research paints a fairly kind picture: reflexes improve through childhood, peak in early adulthood, and then hold steady for a surprisingly long time before they start to slip.

Childhood and the teenage years

Young children are much slower than adults, and anyone who has played catch with a five-year-old has seen it. As the brain and nervous system mature, signals travel faster and the brain gets better at turning "I see it" into "I'm moving". Reaction times keep improving through the school years and get close to adult speeds by the late teens.

The peak comes early

Most people are at their quickest somewhere between their late teens and mid-twenties. One unusual study suggests the decline starts sooner than most of us would like. Researchers at Simon Fraser University analysed in-game data from 3,305 StarCraft 2 players aged 16 to 44 and found that their in-game response speed began to slow from around age 24.

What happened next is the encouraging bit. The older players weren't simply worse. They seemed to make up for the lost speed by leaning on game features that reduced their mental workload. Experience and strategy cover for a few missing milliseconds, which is why the best players in plenty of sports and esports aren't the youngest ones.

Remarkably stable until about 50

The best large-scale picture of adult reaction times comes from the UK Health and Lifestyle Survey, which tested thousands of people of all ages. When Geoff Der and Ian Deary reanalysed the results for 7,130 adults in 2006, they found two different patterns.

Simple reaction time, where there's one signal and one response like in this game, barely changed until people reached their fifties. Choice reaction time, where there are several possible signals that each need a different response, slowed steadily across the whole adult age range.

So the simpler the task, the longer your speed holds up. Tapping a target the moment it appears is about as simple as tasks get. On a good day, a 45-year-old can easily match a 25-year-old here.

After 50, slower and patchier

From middle age onwards, reaction times slow more noticeably, and they get less consistent as well. The gap between a person's best and worst attempts tends to widen. Some of this is biology, with slower processing and nerve signalling. Some of it is strategy. Older adults often trade a little speed for accuracy, which is a perfectly sensible habit in everyday life, even if it costs points in a reaction test.

What this means for your score

Compare yourself with yourself. Age-group averages vary from study to study and device to device, so your own best score over time is a far better yardstick than any table.

Day-to-day factors also matter more than birthdays. One bad night's sleep can cost you more than a decade of ageing, and there's more on that in what affects reaction time. Your device plays a part too: a slow phone screen can add tens of milliseconds, as explained in how online reaction tests work.

Can you slow the decline?

Nobody stops the clock, but staying physically active, sleeping well and keeping your brain busy with fast-paced tasks all help. Research from Daphne Bavelier's lab found that people who play action video games respond faster than non-players without becoming less accurate, though the size of that effect is still debated (see do video games improve reaction time?). And practising a specific task, this one included, reliably improves your scores on it.

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