The effects of hypoxia on serial response time

Publisher Website
Google Scholar
Abstract
The effects of hypoxia were investigated using a serial reponse time task where number of choices, movement distance and stimulus brightness were varied. Hypoxia was induced with a low percentage oxygen mixture and blood oxygen saturation was controlled at 64-3%, equivalent to 6700m. Hypoxia increased response latency more under low than high stimulus brightness, added a constant to the function representing number of choices but increased the slope of the movement distance function. These results were interpreted as pointing to hypoxia increasing simple reaction time by decreasing the effective brightness of the stimulus and interfering with some aspect of the information processing system controlling movement time. Error rate was increased slightly and the pattern of latency around an error led to the suggestion that increased error rates with hypoxia may reflect shifts in the speed-accuracy operating characteristic. Examination of individual latency distributions led to the conclusion that hypoxia acts to slow performance by shifting the whole distribution. In addition, the possibility could not be entirely dismissed of an increase in the number of particularly stow responses which may reflect intermittent ‘blocking’ although other explanations for slow responses could not be rejected.

This publication has 24 references indexed in Scilit: