With the rise of competitive esports, professional players seek any marginal gain in performance. A team of sports scientists investigated whether wearing blue-light blocking glasses affects the reaction time of players during intense gaming sessions.
A sample of forty competitive gamers took part in the experiment. They were aged 16–25 years. The players were randomly assigned to either the 'blue-light blocking' condition or the 'control' condition, with 20 players in each condition.
In the 'blue-light blocking' condition, players wore a pair of commercially available blue-light blocking glasses. After wearing them for 30 minutes while playing a standard warm-up game, they performed a standardised target-tracking test on a 240Hz monitor. They had to click 50 targets that appeared at random intervals, and their mean reaction time (in milliseconds) was recorded.
In the 'control' condition, players followed the exact same procedure but wore clear-lens glasses with no blue-light filtering properties.
The reaction times were recorded in milliseconds (ms). The findings from the 'blue-light blocking' condition were: mean reaction time = 215.4 ms, standard deviation = 18.2 ms. The findings from the 'control' condition were: mean reaction time = 232.8 ms, standard deviation = 22.5 ms.
Write a suitable hypothesis for this experiment.
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