Why choice reaction is slower than simple reaction

In a simple reaction test there is one signal and one response, so your brain can pre-load the movement and just wait for the trigger. Add four possible stimuli and four possible responses and every round gains two extra processing stages: identifying which color appeared, and selecting which button answers it. That decision work typically adds 100–200 ms — a psychology result known as Hick’s law, where response time grows with the number of choices.

That is exactly what makes this test interesting: the gap between your simple and choice reaction times is a cleaner measure of your decision speed than either number alone. Two players with identical 250 ms simple reactions can differ by 150 ms here.

Accuracy is part of the score

Wrong presses are counted and shown with your result, and the timer keeps running until you hit the correct button — so mashing a guess is strictly worse than a beat of genuine recognition. The sustainable strategy is the one worth training: read the color, then commit.

The buttons keep fixed positions the whole run, so part of what you are learning across rounds is the color-to-position mapping itself. That is also why your later rounds are usually faster than your first — and why the median, not the mean, is the headline score.