Abstract

The goal of this project is to determine if a relationship exists between one’s reaction time in milliseconds and how long they slept the night before in hours. Over twenty studies on the effect of sleep loss and reaction time confirm a likely association between sleep deprivation and longer reaction times. While it is generally true that a night of poor sleep leads to slower cognitive processing, this project is focused on finding if sleep deprivation has a noticeable effect on children’s (ages 12 through 17) reaction speed. The data was collected from 116 respondents through a Google Form that was posted on Instagram® and sent to Stanford Online High School Skype groups. A Spearman Rank Correlation Coefficient test and a Mann-Whitney U-test or Kruskal-Wallis test were conducted for all data groups. The correlation test was used to find a monotonic correlation between sleep and reaction time, and the nonparametric tests compared the medians of different data groups. The results of this project suggest that there is no relationship between sleep and reaction speed in children. This differs from other studies on sleep and reaction time in adults, which could mean that children are less affected by sleep loss.