Reaction time in young archers: Mylchenko 2014 study

Fifteen archers aged 14 to 16 from a sports school in Kharkiv, Ukraine, took a computer test of simple reaction time: a visual stimulus appears and the participant responds as fast as possible. They were split into three groups of five according to the Ukrainian sports classification: candidates for master of sport, first category and second category.

Mean reaction time was 234 milliseconds for the candidate masters, 225 for the first category and 273 for the second. So the fastest group was not the highest-ranked one, and the gap between the first two groups is 9 milliseconds. Consistency tells a different story: the average standard deviation of each archer from one trial to the next was 56 milliseconds for the candidate masters, 72 for the first category and 75 for the second. The author concludes that the better archers react more consistently, the first-category archers faster but with very variable results, and that the slower time of the second category points to preparation that is still lacking.

Within the groups the spread is wide: in the second category one archer was at 229 milliseconds and another at 351, with a standard deviation of 137 milliseconds across his or her own trials.

Testing took place at the 'Kommunar' youth sports school in Kharkiv, archery section, with young people born between 1998 and 2000. Reaction time was measured with a programme called 'Complex-reaction', which records the latency of a simple motor response to a visual stimulus. For each archer the paper gives the mean time, the standard deviation and the coefficient of variation across their trials; the group values are the averages of these three numbers over the five archers.

The paper does not say how many trials each archer completed, what the stimulus looked like, which hand or key was used to respond, or what kind of bow the archers shot. Statistics are listed among the methods, but the text contains no test comparing the groups: the comparisons are made by looking at the means and the charts.

Five archers per group and no statistical test: with individual means ranging from 198 to 276 milliseconds among the candidate masters alone, a 9-millisecond difference between candidate masters and first category tells us nothing, and the gap for the second category rests largely on one archer at 351 milliseconds. The conclusion about 'insufficient preparation' goes beyond the data: the test measures a reaction time, not how well prepared an archer is, and the study records no shooting scores at all.

There is also a point of interpretation. The 'dispersion' the author discusses is the average of the individual standard deviations, that is how much each archer varies from one trial to the next, not how much the archers in a group differ from each other. The text credits the best second-category result to archer number 3 (232 milliseconds), while the table gives 229 milliseconds to number 2; one coefficient of variation in the same table (21% for 81 over 289) does not match the calculation. Finally, simple reaction to a stimulus that appears without warning is a demand far removed from archery, where the archer chooses when to release.

For anyone who shoots the study changes nothing. In archery there is no external stimulus to react to: the archer decides when to release, so a shorter simple reaction time has no demonstrated link with score, and this study does not look for one. The fact that the highest-ranked young archers were not the fastest points the same way.

The only lead is consistency: the better-ranked archers responded a little more evenly from one trial to the next. With five young people per group and no statistical comparison, though, this remains an observation, not a finding on which to build a selection test or a training method.