Testing the accuracy of timing reports in visual timing tasks with a consumer-grade digital camera

Authors

Rachael E. Smyth, The University of Western Ontario
Janis Oram Cardy, The University of Western Ontario
David Purcell, The University of Western OntarioFollow

Document Type

Article

Publication Date

6-1-2017

Journal

Behavior Research Methods

Volume

49

Issue

3

First Page

967

Last Page

971

URL with Digital Object Identifier

10.3758/s13428-016-0757-6

Abstract

© 2016, Psychonomic Society, Inc. This study tested the accuracy of a visual timing task using a readily available and relatively inexpensive consumer grade digital camera. A visual inspection time task was recorded using short high-speed video clips and the timing as reported by the task’s program was compared to the timing as recorded in the video clips. Discrepancies in these two timing reports were investigated further and based on display refresh rate, a decision was made whether the discrepancy was large enough to affect the results as reported by the task. In this particular study, the errors in timing were not large enough to impact the results of the study. The procedure presented in this article offers an alternative method for performing a timing test, which uses readily available hardware and can be used to test the timing in any software program on any operating system and display.