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Maths IA
Maths IA
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Table of Contents:
INTRODUCTION 3
RATIONALE AND AIM 3-4
METHODOLOGY 4-5
HYPOTHESIS 5
CALCULATIONS
FINDING AVERAGES 5-6
PEARSON'S PRODUCT MOMENT CORRELATION COEFFICIENT 7-10
SPEARMAN'S RANK CORRELATION COEFFICIENT 11-13
ANALYSIS 6-13
CONCLUSION 13-14
BIBLIOGRAPHY 14
APPENDIX 15-16
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Introduction:
I have chosen to do an investigation on age and reaction times because such situations may
arrive in my chosen field of career, medicine. When new medicines go through trials, many
tests are done to the test subjects. With the use of correlation, conclusions like how fast a
specific amount of dosage can treat the patient can be reached. Hence why knowing how to
conduct a correlation investigation is significant. I have studied about correlation and the
reaction times of humans in my GCSE course of biology so I have the knowledge of the
The aim of this investigation is to obtain how much impact does the age of humans affect their
reaction rates. I will be determining the results of this investigation by conducting a scatter plot
of the data, if the scatter graph shows linear correlation I will use Pearson’s product moment
correlation coefficient, and if the scatter graph shows non-linear correlation, I will use
Spearman’s rank correlation coefficient. And the value of the correlation will quantify the
Methodology:
It is a known fact that the older a person gets, the slower their reaction time. I did not do this
experiment with people aged between 19 and 23 because after the teenager phase, the brain’s
response time starts to decline at the age of 24 which would be an essential part to the data that
has been collected1 and be considered as an anomaly. With reactions from the age of 24, a
meaningful change in reaction times will be seen between teenagers and adults. To arrive at a
1
https://www.pbs.org/newshour/science/brains-reaction-time-peaks-age-24-study-finds
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valid and reliable conclusion, I have done the reaction test with 7 people from each age group
(5 times each) making sure they have not consumed any caffeine before the experiment. I have
chosen caffeine as one of the major control variables because it can slow down reaction times
and this would have led to unreliable results. To conduct this experiment, I kept all 21 of my
candidates’ diet caffeine free at least two days prior to the experiment so that the data would
be valid. When I had gone to India during the summer holidays, I had the conducted this
reaction time experiment on some family members and then some friends and family back in
the United Arab Emirates. The raw data of each child/teenager/adult’s reaction time each time
My independent variable for this experiment is the different age groups and the dependent
variable as the number of seconds it took them to catch the ruler. I then converted the data in
other control variables were keeping the distance between the hand of the candidate and the
Once I made sure all my control variables were controlled, I held the long stick 5 centimeters
away from the hand which would catch it and as soon as I would drop the long stick, a third
person will start the timer and stop when the candidate would catch it. Similarly, I repeated this
5 times with each candidate (raw data in the appendix). The way I conducted the experiment is
2
https://www.biologycorner.com/worksheets/response_time.html
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Hypothesis:
Due to my previous knowledge from Biology, my null hypothesis (H0) for this investigation
would be that reaction times are independent of age and my alternate hypothesis (H1) would be
Calculations:
Finding Averages
To plot the scatter graph of the mean values, I had to first calculate the average for each person.
To find the average, I added all 5 reaction times and then divided the total value by 5.
For example:
Analysis:
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Table 2: Table showing the mean reaction times of 7 children (6-12):
200
12
180
11
160
11
180
12
160
8
180
10
160
6
200
150
100
50
0
0 2 4 6 8 10 12 14
Age
With this graph it can be claimed that as the age increased, the mean reaction time of the
children also increased. For age 11, it is visible that there are two different mean values – 160
and 180 and age 12 has two different values as well – 180 and 200. The reason why the values
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could be different for the same age is because as individuals both children are different.
Children in the 180-200 milliseconds range could be more active with their feet which could’ve
had a major impact on their reaction time with their hands. These environmental factors cannot
be controlled and hence the difference of reaction time with other children.
Since this is a linear graph, I will be conducting Pearson’s product moment correlation
Sx = [𝑛 ∑ 𝑥 2 − (∑ 𝑥)2 ] and;
Sy = [𝑛 ∑ 𝑦 2 − (∑ 𝑦)2 ]
𝑛 (∑ 𝑥𝑦)−(∑ 𝑥)(∑ 𝑦)
r=
√[𝑛 ∑ 𝑥 2 −(∑ 𝑥)2 ][𝑛 ∑ 𝑦 2 −(∑ 𝑦)2 ]
In this case: n is the number of trials, x is the children’s age, and y is the mean reaction time.
∑ 𝑥 = 11 + 12 + 12 + 11 + 8 + 10 + 6 = 70
∑ 𝑥𝑦 = (200 × 12) + (180 × 11) + (160 × 11) + (180 × 12) + (160 × 8) + (180 ×
7 (12340)−(70)(1220)
r=
√[7(730)−(70)2 ][7(214000)−(1220)2 ]
980
r= = 0.690
√2016000
3
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zBAOPENjRBc&t=182s
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This PMCC value for children between the age of 6 to 12 was a moderately positive correlation.
The reason for the correlation not being strong is because of some of the uncontrollable factors
in this investigation. Children are usually very involved in many different activities during their
childhood and even genetics sometimes play a role in reaction times, for example ADHD4
(attention deficit hyperactivity disorder) which is one of the most common neurodevelopmental
disorders of childhood5.
Next, I calculated the mean reaction time of teenagers age from 13 to 18, generated a graph off
250
18
240
18
250
17
210
15
200
14
190
13
230
17
4
https://www.xcode.life/genes-and-personality/how-genes-influence-your-reaction-
time/#:~:text=Reaction%20time%20is%20influenced%20in,its%20effects%20on%20reaction%20time.
5
https://www.cdc.gov/ncbddd/adhd/facts.html#:~:text=ADHD%20is%20one%20of%20the,and%20often%20la
sts%20into%20adulthood.
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Graph 2: Graph showing the mean reaction times of 7 teenagers (13-18):
200
150
100
50
0
0 5 10 15 20
Age
Looking at this graph, it can be stated that the older the teenager the greater the mean reaction
time. In the previous graph (graph 1) there were two different values for the same age and even
in this graph (graph 2) the data for teenagers shows the same. Children and teenagers go
through a growing phase which ends up affecting their reaction times leading to many
similarities between them. The data of children and teenagers don’t have a huge gap between
them unlike a huge gap between teenagers and adults as presented later in the exploration.
In this investigation, I also got to know that when young tweens/teenagers hit puberty, their
reaction time improves, hence which proves the small difference in reaction times between
children and young teenagers (13-14). At age 13 – around the puberty hitting age – the reaction
time is the lowest and from the previous data one of the 12-year-old had a reaction time of 200
milliseconds proving that during puberty reaction time can improve. Females tend to level off
from 15 to 17 years6 which makes sense with the graph presented. The teenager aged 14 is a
female and so is the 17-year-old with the reaction time of 250 milliseconds. The data supports
6
https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/10671315.1975.10616684#:~:text=Mean%20reaction%20tim
es%20decreased%20markedly,and%20males%20were%20consistently%20faster.
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the point made by the authors Fulton and Hubbard; the reaction time of the 17-year-old is
obviously greater than the 14-year-old establishing two things: reaction times do slow down
after puberty for girls and that my alternate hypothesis for this investigation is true which is
that reaction times are dependent of age. The gender also plays a role in the reaction times;
however, I haven’t focused on specific gender instead I have looked at different age groups.
This has had an impact on my results due to gender also being an important control variable.
I calculated Pearson’s PMCC for teenagers as well because the line on the graph shows a linear
correlation. The PMCC value for teenagers is 0.956 which shows a strongly positive
correlation. A gradual increase in reaction times from children to teenagers shows that
increasing age does in fact increase reaction times regardless of some different values from the
raw data because they could’ve been simply affected by the uncontrollable environmental and
genetic factors.
Lastly, I calculated the mean reaction time of adults, generated a graph off Microsoft excel and
39 440
36 410
24 350
48 500
26 330
31 370
28 340
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Graph 3: Graph showing the mean reaction times of 7 adults (24-48):
500
400
300
200
100
0
0 10 20 30 40 50 60
Age
In this graph, there is a positive relationship between the mean reaction time and age, just like
the previous graphs. It can be seen from the graph that the oldest adult has the highest mean
reaction time, nevertheless, the youngest adult does not have the lowest mean reaction time.
As I previously mentioned this could have been due any of the uncontrollable environmental
and genetic factors. Ignoring the 24-year-old’s reaction time, there is a strong linear line
To determine whether the correlation is strong, moderate, or weak, I used the Spearman’s rank
correlation coefficient as the scatter shows a curved relation. Pearson’s PMCC and Spearman’s
rank correlation coefficient was used to tell how strong the correlation between two variables7.
If the degree of scatter (denoted as r) is a positive number (it will be closer to 1), then the
correlation is strong positive and if the r value is a negative number (closer to -1), then the
7
https://revisionmaths.com/advanced-level-maths-revision/statistics/product-moment-correlation-coefficient
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Calculating Spearman’s Rank Correlation Coefficient
Table 4: Table showing the ranking of adults’ age and their mean reaction time
6 ∑ 𝑑2
𝜌 = 1 − 𝑛(𝑛2𝑖 −1)
In this case: n is the number of adults and d2 is the rank difference squared.
∑𝑖 𝑑 2 = 0 + 0 + 4 + 0 + 1 + 0 + 1 = 6
6×6
𝜌 = 1 − 7(72−1)
36
𝜌 = 1 − 336 = 0.893
This Spearman’s rank correlation coefficient value illustrates that there is a strong positive
correlation between the mean reaction times and the age of the adults.
Conclusion:
After investigating my research question: to what extent does age (6-12, 13-18, and 24-48
years) affect the reaction time, I have concluded that age affects reaction time to a great extent.
8
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XGRqcI2R0H8
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Even though other factors also play a role in reaction times, age is clearly one of the very
significant factors. For example, in teenagers it was mentioned that puberty can lower reaction
times and puberty arrives with increasing age, therefore proving the significance of age. As an
individual grows older, the chances of getting genetic diseases or stress-related diseases also
increases. Most of the environmental and genetic factors which were uncontrollable for this
investigation are also impacted by age. The aim of my investigation was to obtain how much
impact age has on reaction times and as I had predicted earlier, the reaction time does get slower
as age increases. There were two strongly positive correlations and one moderately positive
which then leads to the rejection of the null hypothesis I had made earlier in the investigation.
The results of this investigation will definitely help me in my future decisions as a doctor which
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Bibliography:
https://revisionmaths.com/advanced-level-maths-revision/statistics/product-moment-
correlation-coefficient
Shalby, Colleen. “Your brain’s reaction peaks at age 24, study finds” PBS news hour
https://www.pbs.org/newshour/science/brains-reaction-time-peaks-age-24-study-finds
https://revisionmaths.com/advanced-level-maths-revision/statistics/product-moment-
correlation-coefficient
“Using the scientific method to measure multitasking and response time” Biology corner
https://www.biologycorner.com/worksheets/response_time.html
Essa. “How to find the Pearson’s correlation coefficient (by hand) Prof. Essa
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zBAOPENjRBc&t=182s
Fulton, Clifton and Alfred W. Hubbard. “Effect of puberty on reaction and movement times”
https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/10671315.1975.10616684#:~:text=Mean%20r
eaction%20times%20decreased%20markedly,and%20males%20were%20consistently%20fas
ter.
Essa. “How to find the Pearson’s correlation coefficient (by hand) Prof. Essa
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XGRqcI2R0H8
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Appendix:
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Age of Reaction time of adults (milliseconds)
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