This diploma thesis deals with children‘s reaction time. The theoretical part of this work describes children as vulnerable road users and discusses methods of measuring reaction time. The practical part presents some realized experiments refer to the children’s reaction time and their results evaluation.

Title: The influence of age, gender and movement activity on the reaction abilities of lower limbs. Objectives: The main objective of this dissertation was to find the reaction abilities of pubescent's (aged 10 - 15years) lower limbs on the basis of age, gender and movement activity. The further aim was to determine the pubescence period (age) when the most noticeable decrease of the visual disjunctive motor response time of lower limbs occurs. Methods: 214 boys and girls aged 10-15 years (157.8 ± 10.8 cm; 47.2 ± 10.7 kg) participated in this research. Simple, choice and disjunctive reaction time of lower limbs was measured through the Fitro Agility Check test. The results processing, including statistical procedures, was carried out using the Matlab (MathWorks, Inc.) programming environment, an IBM SPSS Statistics 22. Three-way ANOVA and Tukey post-hoc tests (α=0.05) were used to determine the individual parameters connection. Results: With increasing age, year over year, we found important differences and reaction time decreases of all types of reaction speeds. Testing brings to light the fact that the most noticeable decrease of both selection and disjunctive reaction time of lower limbs are between groups of 11 year olds (11.00-11.99) and 12 year olds (12.00-12.99). The most noticeable decrease...

Title: The influence of age, gender and movement activity on the reaction abilities of lower limbs. Objectives: The main objective of this dissertation was to find the reaction abilities of pubescent's (aged 10 - 15years) lower limbs on the basis of age, gender and movement activity. The further aim was to determine the pubescence period (age) when the most noticeable decrease of the visual disjunctive motor response time of lower limbs occurs. Methods: 214 boys and girls aged 10-15 years (157.8 ± 10.8 cm; 47.2 ± 10.7 kg) participated in this research. Simple, choice and disjunctive reaction time of lower limbs was measured through the Fitro Agility Check test. The results processing, including statistical procedures, was carried out using the Matlab (MathWorks, Inc.) programming environment, an IBM SPSS Statistics 22. Three-way ANOVA and Tukey post-hoc tests (α=0.05) were used to determine the individual parameters connection. Results: With increasing age, year over year, we found important differences and reaction time decreases of all types of reaction speeds. Testing brings to light the fact that the most noticeable decrease of both selection and disjunctive reaction time of lower limbs are between groups of 11 year olds (11.00-11.99) and 12 year olds (12.00-12.99). The most noticeable decrease...

Title: Monitoring of reaction abilities in different age categories of judo athletes Objectives: The aim of the thesis was to assess the influence of judo on the reaction abilities among different age groups of judo athletes. This finding should help to develop a view of necessity of focusing on reaction abilities during exercise unit. Methods: During the research a reactometer was used to capture simple and complex reaction time to visual stimulus and tactile response. Overall 166 individuals (100 men, 66 women) took part of the monitoring from which 3 were excluded. Every proband has undergone one test measurement (5 stimuls at least) and two evaluated ones (20 seconds each). The shorter - reaction time score was consider as a result for the particular test. The outcomes were utilized via Kruskal - Wallis test, Pearsons's and Spearman's correlation coefficient, Mann - Whitney's test and others. Results: The biggest difference between reaction period was observed between the age group of 8-10 and older groups. This category has also significantly differed in reaction period and the highest median. Statistically any notable difference was not confirmed among judo athletes and our control group in contrary with the situation between individual age categories. The hypothesis of judo athletes training...

This thesis aims to investigate how well associative learning can account for human sequence learning under incidental conditions. It seems that we can learn complex sequential information about events in our environment, for example language or music, incidentally, without being aware of it. Awareness is, however, a complex issue with arguments for (Dienes, 2012) and against (Shanks, 2005) the existence of implicit learning processes. A dual process account proposes that there exist two different learning systems, one based on conscious, controlled reasoning and rules, and the other based on automatic association formation, which can take place outside of awareness (McLaren, Green, & Mackintosh, 1994). This thesis attempts to use the predictions of an associative account in conjunction with a suitable method for investigating implicit learning: sequence learning (Destrebecqz & Cleeremans, 2003). The research involves a collection of serial reaction time (SRT) tasks whereby participants respond to on-screen stimuli that follow a sequence that they were (intentional learning) or were not (incidental learning) informed of. Following on from the experimental design of Jones and McLaren (2009) this thesis provides evidence that humans differ in their ability to learn different sequential contingencies. After training sequences of trials where the current trial location was twice as likely to be either: the same as (Same rule); or different to (Different rule) the location two trials before this, participants were far better at learning the latter rule. I found that this result was not adequately simulated by the benchmark associative model of sequence learning, the Augmented SRN (Cleeremans & McClelland, 1991), and present a revised model. This model, amongst other attributes, represents all the stimuli experienced by participants and can therefore learn stimulus-response contingencies. These seem to block learning (to some extent) about the Same rule thus providing an associative explanation of the advantage for acquisition of the Different rule. Further predictions regarding the role of additional stimuli alongside sequence learning were then derived from this associative account and tested on human participants. The first of these was that additional stimuli within the task will interact with sequence learning. I found that human participants show increased Same rule learning when additional, concurrently presented stimuli follow the previous element in the sequence. I demonstrate that when participants perform an SRT task where responses are predicted by the colour of a cue, they are able to learn about this relationship in the absence of awareness. Using this cue-response learning I further investigate cue-competition between sequences and colours under incidental conditions and find evidence that suggests between cue associations may alter the influence of cue competition. These results altogether suggest that stimuli – both simple and sequential – can be learned under incidental conditions. This thesis further proposes that learning about simple and more complex relationships between stimuli interacts according to the predictions of an associative account and provides evidence that contributes to a dual process understanding of human learning.

Traditionally, reaction time (RT) was conceived of as an average speed of a number of responses made by an individual, or mean RT. Increasingly, however, intraindividual variability in reaction time (RT IIV) – the consistency of responses by a single person across trials – is used as an additional or even alternative measure. RT IIV is often found to be elevated in a number of conditions that affect the central nervous system functioning, such as traumatic brain injury or neurodegenerative diseases. It can predict change in cognitive performance in ageing, progression from normal ageing to mild cognitive impairment, and even death. Therefore, RT IIV may be of great practical importance. However, RT IIV and mean RT are correlated; therefore it is often problematic to draw conclusions about unique associations between these and other variables. One objective of the work presented in this thesis was to investigate determinants and correlates of simple and choice RT IIV and to test which associations may be accounted for by the individual differences in mean RT. The first investigation was concerned with age differences in RT IIV. Following a systematic review of literature, a series of meta-analyses demonstrated that older individuals (aged 60 years and above) have greater RT IIV than young or middle-aged adults in simple and choice RT tasks. The effects were reduced but still significant when RT IIV was adjusted for mean RT. The next study was a cross-sectional investigation of the associations between age and RT IIV, as well as of sex differences in RT IIV, across the lifespan in participants ranging in age from 4 to 75. Non-linear effects of age were found for RT IIV measures, such that variability decreased with age in children and increased with age in older adults. A novel finding from this study was that sex differences in RT IIV were present among adults but not children, suggesting that there might be an age threshold at which sexes diverge in their RT IIV trajectories. The results also indicated that findings regarding RT IIV may differ depending on the variability measure used (that is, whether and how mean RT is controlled). The second study on the same sample investigated variability on a trial-by-trial basis. Specifically, it tested the hypothesis that sex differences in variability are due to females being disproportionately slower at the first trial which inflates their overall RT IIV. This hypothesis was not supported. Another investigation used longitudinal data from the West of Scotland Twenty-07 study. Three cohorts of individuals aged approximately 15, 35 and 55, were followed up for 20 years and had RT data collected at four occasions. Analyses confirmed non-linear effects of age on RT IIV found in the earlier cross-sectional investigation. The final study investigated the effect of high altitude on RT IIV. It found that altitude-related increase in RT IIV is fully accounted for by general slowing of RT at high altitude. The overall pattern of results obtained from the investigations suggests that RT IIV increases with age in adults and that not all of the increase is due to general slowing. Moreover, the results show that sex differences in RT IIV are not uniform across the lifespan. Finally, whereas associations of RT IIV with some variables, for example age, are relatively robust to controlling for mean RT, others are fully attenuated by such practice.

This investigation was designed to determine relative effects of monetary reward and knowledge of results on complex-choice reaction time tasks. Subjects were twenty-five male and thirty-two female undergraduate students. Apparatus consisted of nine stimulus lights and eight response keys. Subjects were required to add the number of lights presented, subtract the sum from a constant, and press the correctly numbered response key. Reward subjects received twenty-five cents for responses faster than a predetermined criterion, and twenty-five cents was deducted for slower responses. Knowledge of results subjects were told their reaction times after each trial. Results indicated (1) no significant differences between any conditions, (2) a significant overall practice effect (.01 level), and (3) that males were significantly faster than females (.01 level).

The subject of the thesis is the determination of syllable boundaries in English with respect to its perceptual relevance. The hypothesis is based on two different theoretical conceptions. The Maximum Onset Principle (MOP), a traditional approach widespread among linguists, assigns intervocalic consonants to neighbouring syllables in such a way that the longest possible onsets are created in the syllables that follow. An alternative view, advocated by John Wells, advises to utilize more complex parameters, such as morphological structure, prosodic structure or, most importantly, the allophonic realization of phonemes as determined by position within the syllable. A word monitoring experiment measuring reaction times, in which listeners pressed a key if they heard a given word in the auditory stimulus, yielded data about listeners' performance in two conditions: in one the items were divided into syllables according to the MOP, in the other according to Wells. The latter was associated with faster reactions, which might be interpreted as cognitively less strenuous. However, the difference between the two conditions was not robust, mainly because of the limited number of listeners.

Charles University in Prague Faculty of Pharmacy in Hradec Králové Department of biophysics and physical chemistry Candidate: Zuzana Pokorná Supervisor: Doc. RNDr. Petr Klemera, CSc. Title of diploma thesis: Resveratrol - effect on the biological age Objective: Resveratrol is a natural polyphenol contained in number of plants. It is a potent antioxidant, which is known to have a number of beneficial health effects and be part of many biological processes. The compound is produced by plants to increase their survival and resistance to disease. We found the effect of Resveratrol on parameters of biological age-on the threshold of perception of the intensity of the volume (hearing) and reaction rate. Methods : A group of people used the resveratrol in a dose of 170 mg per day for 40 days. We measured by the PC program the selected parameter of hearing and reaction rate. Results : It has been shown that statistically significant improvement of hearing has occurred. The exact mechanism of the effect is not known. Probably operates through a group of enzymes, sirtuins. Reaction rate was not affected by substance. Conclusions : We have reviewed the potential effect of Resveratrol on human biological age. The improvement of hearing has been shown at the 0,01 significance level. The biggest improvement was...

Title: THE MEASUREMENT OF THE REACTION TIME ON THE AUDITORY STIMULI CONCERNING THE PLAYERS OF GOALBALL. Objectives: The main objective of this paper is the measurement of the reaction time on the auditory stimuli concerning the players of goalball. Another objective is to analyze acquired data and to compare measured values with those measured within the healthy population. The last objective is to compare health groups B1, B2, B3 and productive groups within the premiere league and the players of the goalball representation. Methods: Measurement and analyzing of the acquired data's methods were used in this paper. The reactometer, earphones and the computer with the software that enables to automatically analyze measured data were the main tools used. Acquired data were displayed in the measured values' chart and within the graph on the axis displaying the course of measurement as well. The analyzing method was used to analyze the individual measured outcomes of the reaction time. Results: The final part of this work was based on the three hypotheses. The first hypothesis assumed that the goalball players' reaction speed is faster than within the healthy population. This hypothesis was confirmed. According to measured outcome, from the sample of the healthy population there was not a person who...