A warning about median reaction time.

Abstract

When used with positively skewed reaction time distributions, sample medians tend to over-estimate population medians. The extent of overestimation is related directly to the amount of skew in the reaction time distributions and inversely to the size of the sample over which the median is computed. Simulations indicate that overestimation could approach 50 ms with small samples and highly skewed distributions. An important practical consequence of the bias in median reaction time is that sample medians must not be used to compare reaction times across experimental conditions when there are unequal numbers of trials in the conditions. If medians are used with unequal sample sizes, then the bias may produce an artifactual difference in conditions or conceal a true difference. Some recent studies of cuing and stimulus probability effects provide examples of this potential artifact.

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