It’s been on by default on every PC I’ve owned for quite a while. I think it started being on since Windows XP, at least.
It guessed me at 41, which is about what I expected. I did not make any effort whatsoever to hurry.
Also, I’m pretty sure the pattern ones are controls. And did anyone else try changing the size of the window during the pauses? During the actual tests, that causes the dot to move.
In my case they were off 29 years (guessed 34, I am 63). I begin to wonder how real this is as a test of age, or if something else completely different was going on.
Roddy
Seeing the results fellow Dopers are posting here, I am starting to wonder if it’s just random guesses, despite the more or less accurate guess they have given in my case.
This is a pretty smart survey. Not that it’s good at guessing ages, guessing ages makes it more likely people will participate. For all we know it’s only comparing mouse and touch input, and doesn’t care about age. Giving people a metric to compare/boast about means more people will try. (Justin Bieber’s IQ is 120! Can you beat him?)
Can someone program mouse movements and clicks to see if their guess really depends on mouse behavior?
They got 29, I’m 43. I thought it would be higher because I have a tremor from medication but I guess the hours and hours I spend clicking every day make up for it.
The site is hosted at Harvard.edu, doubt if they are up to anything shady. The purpose of their test may well be somerthing other than what they say it is, in the time honored tradition of psychological testing, but that’s prolly about it.
When I was in college I took introductory psychology and part of passing the class was “volunteering” to be a human subject for several experiments. They were all similar to this test–sit at a computer and do a task.
One of them involved coming back for two consecutive weeks. And the first time I sat down to start doing my task, a strange screen came up and the research assistant ran over saying “oops!!!” and re-set it.
Yeah, that totally wasn’t an oops. It had something to do with the experiment.
Makes sense, perhaps this thread would be more fun if we assume it IS part of somebody’s psych master’s project and play, “Guess the experiment.”
It seems rigged to almost never give your correct age–by quite a bit. It also collects your actual age (why would you lie?), how much time you spend in front of a computer (why would you lie), and gives you an opportunity to comment. Hmmm. Looking for what sorts of people might post anonymous, antisocial vs. constructive comments and correlating that with time spent in the matrix? Cyberbullying & trolling seems to be a hot topic these days.