Wait for green, then tap as fast as you can. Five taps, about twenty seconds.
Touchscreens add about 50 to 100 ms of their own delay, so the same person reads faster on a PC.
The clearest benchmark comes from a study of 1,469 adults aged 18 to 65. Their average simple reaction time was 231 ms, or 213 ms once the researchers subtracted the delay contributed by their own keyboard and monitor. The spread was tight: a standard deviation of 27 ms, so most people land somewhere between roughly 200 and 260 ms on clean desktop hardware.
This test is not a laboratory. A touchscreen adds about 50 to 100 ms of its own latency before your tap registers, and a 60 Hz display can hold the green frame for another 17 ms before you see it. That is why your number here reads slower than the lab figure, and why the fairest comparison is against other people on similar hardware. The line under your result does exactly that: it places your average against everyone who took this test in the last 30 days.
| Your average here | What it means |
|---|---|
| Under 220 ms | Lightning. Fast for a touchscreen, competitive on a mouse. |
| 220 to 270 ms | Sharp. At or ahead of the typical adult. |
| 270 to 330 ms | Solid. The ordinary range for a phone tap. |
| Over 330 ms | Warming up. Run it again rested; first attempts always read slow. |
Age costs much less than people expect. In the same study, simple reaction time rose by 0.55 ms per year of adult age, and the slowing came from motor output rather than eyesight: the time to detect the stimulus averaged 131 ms and did not change with age at all.
| Age | Expected difference from a 20-year-old |
|---|---|
| 20 | baseline |
| 30 | about 6 ms slower |
| 40 | about 11 ms slower |
| 50 | about 17 ms slower |
| 60 | about 22 ms slower |
Those figures are what the 0.55 ms per year slope works out to, not separately measured averages for each decade. Put them next to the 27 ms standard deviation and the point lands: the difference between two people of the same age is wider than the 22 ms that four decades of ageing add. A separate survey of 7,130 UK adults found simple reaction time holding nearly flat until about 50, while choice reaction time, where you must first decide which response to make, slowed across the whole adult range.
Sources: Woods and others, Factors influencing the latency of simple reaction time, Frontiers in Human Neuroscience, 2015. Der and Deary, Age and sex differences in reaction time in adulthood, Psychology and Aging, 2006.
Sleep first. Sleep loss slows responses and, worse, adds occasional very slow lapses where you simply do not fire. One bad night measurably changes your number, which is the single biggest lever most people ignore.
Warm up before you measure. First attempts run slow. If you want an honest baseline, run this test twice and keep the second result.
Caffeine, in moderation. A modest dose helps alertness, especially when tired. Too much trades speed for jitter, which is a bad deal for anything that also needs precision.
Accept the floor, train everything above it. Your raw reaction speed is mostly biology and practice barely moves it. What practice does change is what happens after the reaction: how efficiently you move, how quickly you choose a response, and how rarely you produce a slow outlier. Our reaction time guide covers the evidence, and Speed mode in the trainer measures reaction converted into an accurate click rather than a bare tap.
231 milliseconds for simple visual reaction in the largest recent benchmark, or 213 ms once the delay from the researchers' own keyboard and monitor was subtracted. Anything you measure at home includes your screen, your input device and your browser, so it reads slower than that.
Yes, by roughly 50 to 100 ms. The same person is consistently faster clicking a mouse than tapping glass. Compare phone results to phone results.
One tap is luck. Five taps with a random wait before each one gives an average that means something and a best that shows your ceiling. Tapping before the screen turns green does not count and restarts that attempt.
No. Reaction time is one ingredient. Aim is reaction plus precision, tracking and target switching with a mouse, which is what the full AimBetween trainer measures on a PC. This test is the phone-sized taste of it.