Any cool data analysis ideas I can add to my project?

I have a pretty simple project, compare reaction times (we used tic and toc commands) of a red and blue flashing box to age and sleep recorded. Basically, someone enters their age and sleep hours from previous night, they press a space bar when they see a red or blue box, and we record their reaction time. I have age with reaction times, hours slept vs reaction times and mean reaction times of blue and red.

We were SLIGHTLY taught ANOVA but it was very glossed over and focused more on regression and correlation lines.

Anyways, I'm looking for some other ways to analyze my data to spice up the presentation. It is a beginner class, so I can't do anything really complicated. Thank you!

Answer 1

[Zuber Khan]

Hi Kristin,

I understand that you want to know about various data analysis strategies. Given that you have data about age, reaction times, hours slept vs reaction times and mean reaction times of blue and red box, I would suggest you the following methods:

You can start with basic descriptive statistics to summarize your data such as calculating standard deviation in reaction time w.r.t. each color group and finding the range of reaction times. For more information on finding range and standard deviation using MATLAB, you can refer to the below documentation links:

https://in.mathworks.com/help/stats/range.html

https://in.mathworks.com/help/matlab/ref/std.html

Further, you can use various visualization methods as mentioned below to perform data analysis:

• Histograms: You can plot histograms of reaction times for each color to visualize the distribution. Kindly refer to the below mentioned documentation for better understanding on histogram plot in MATLAB: https://in.mathworks.com/help/matlab/ref/matlab.graphics.chart.primitive.histogram.html
• Box Plots: You can create box plots to show the spread and central tendency of reaction times for different colors, ages, or hours of sleep. You can refer to the following documentation for better clarity on how to visualize summary statistics with box plot in MATLAB: https://in.mathworks.com/help/stats/boxplot.html
• Scatter Plots: You can use scatter plots to visualize the relationship between age or hours of sleep and reaction times. Refer to the following documentation for understanding how to scatter plot using MATLAB: https://in.mathworks.com/help/matlab/ref/scatter.html

Also, you can conduct a t-test to compare the means of two groups (e.g., reaction times for red vs. blue). In order to know more about two sample t-test in MATLAB, kindly refer to the following documentation link:

https://in.mathworks.com/help/stats/ttest2.html

I hope this resolves your query!

Regards,

Zuber