The Results and What They Mean
Now we could answer the question, “How long does it take people to detect 1.2 seconds of delay?” As you can see from [the table opposite], the times ranged all the way from 20 seconds to over 10 minutes, and, in two cases delay was not detected at all. The results in the table are also shown in the [histogram on the next page], which depicts how broadly the detection times were distributed. To me, one of the most interesting things is that even people who were able to detect delay quickly sometimes did not detect it for a couple of minutes. For example, the pair K/G had two times under a minute, one of 143 seconds, and one of 421 seconds. I interpret their two short times to mean that they knew what to look for, since they made no incorrect responses while delay was not present. However, their long times seem to mean that they sometimes didn’t notice delay for quite a while. Incidentally, only two responses were made during the total of about 40 minutes when I did not introduce delay, and these “false alarms” were by two of the fastest pairs at true detection—F/K and S/H.