An experiment to find out the difference in the speed of reaction between someone dropping a ruler and catching it in his or her right or left hand.

Variables:

These are the conditions and factors that I will keep the same at all times:

• The height at which the ruler is released.
• All other conditions.

The condition that I will change is:

• The person catching the ruler.

Apparatus List:

• Table
• A metre ruler

Diagram:

Average right: 245mm                                Average left: 271mm

This Graph shows person 1 catching the ruler. Person 1 is right handed and as you can see on the table and on the graph that when he is attempting to catch it with his right hand he is faster than with his left hand. This is because he is used to using his right hand.

This is a graph showing person 2 catching the ruler. With this graph you can see that person 2 caught the ruler faster with their left hand than they did with their right hand. This is because person 2 was actually left hand so he was faster because he caught it with his preferred hand.

Graph 1 and 2 agree with my prediction which was ‘the person catching the ruler will be faster when they use they preferred hand’.

This a bar graph showing person 3 catching the ruler. As you can see person 3 was also right handed as their attempts at catching the ruler with their right hand were faster than catching it with their left hand. This is because they can catch the ruler faster with there stronger hand.

Conclusion:

After doing my investigation I have found out that when the person is catching the ruler with their weaker hand they are slower than they would be with their stronger hand. This agrees with my prediction.  For example person 1 was right handed and their average for that is 208mm but when they tried with their left hand their average was 264mm, which was slower. Also if you look at person 2 who was left hand their average for their left hand was 271mm but their average for their right hand was 347mm, which was a lot slower. Both of these examples agree with my prediction.

Evaluation:

Overall, I think my Investigation was very successful - I have a good, satisfactory set of results which I combined to work out an average. If we had had more time I could have carried out my investigation for a second time to make it more reliable. To improve my Investigation further I could have made a comparison between ages and sex to see if that affected the results of right or left hand.