Abstract
Reaction times of Olympic sprinters provide insights into the most rapid of human response times. To determine whether minimum reaction times have changed as athlete training has become ever more specialized, we analyzed the results from the Olympic Games between 2004 and 2016. The results for the 100 m and 110 m hurdle events show that minimum reaction times have systematically decreased between 2004 and 2016 for both sexes, with women showing a marked decrease since 2008 that eliminated the sex difference in 2012. Because overall race times have not systematically decreased between 2004 and 2016, the most likely explanation for the apparent decrease in reaction times is a reduction in the proprietary force thresholds used to calculate the reaction times based on force sensors in starting blocks—and not the result of more specialized or effective training.
Highlights
The ability to rapidly respond to an external auditory stimulus is important when encountering emergent situations in daily activities such as driving or when operating machinery
Reaction times of sprinters at the Olympic Games offer insights into the fastest human reaction times because there is little question as to their states of arousal, motivation, learning or training [1]. (To avoid confusion, since this paper employs International Association of Athletics Federation (IAAF) data on ‘reaction time’, that term is used throughout this paper rather than the more usual scientific term ‘response time’.) It is unknown if the reaction times of sprinters at the Olympic Games remain stable from year to year, or whether changes to the focused training that athletes undergo in preparation for each Olympics can improve their reaction times
The coefficients for the resulting fixed effects can be seen in Table 1 and, when considered with the results in Fig 1B, they suggest that reaction times decreased significantly in the more recent Olympics
Summary
The ability to rapidly respond to an external auditory stimulus is important when encountering emergent situations in daily activities such as driving or when operating machinery. Reaction times of sprinters at the Olympic Games offer insights into the fastest human reaction times because there is little question as to their states of arousal, motivation, learning or training [1]. Understanding the effect of this focused training on the fastest human reaction times could provide insights into the trainability of athletes and other individuals for time-critical situations. Investigating potential sex differences in the fastest human reaction times in elite Olympic sprinters has important implications on the design of human-machine interfaces for handling time-critical behaviors.
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