In a calibrated study of 1,469 adults, mean simple visual reaction time was about 231 ms before correcting for hardware delay. Other experiments produce different averages depending on equipment and task.
That makes a useful baseline for fun comparisons, but it is not a biological speed limit and it is not directly equivalent to an animal escape reflex.
Fruit flies can react to threatening visual cues with remarkably short latencies. One Drosophila study measured escape responses at about 22 ms after a looming stimulus reached its triggering threshold, and about 25 ms after a light-off cue.
Other fly reflexes can be even faster when driven by different sensory pathways. These responses use highly specialised neural circuits built for survival.
The star-nosed mole is famous for rapid foraging. Research reported individual prey-identification-and-eating sequences as short as 120 ms, with a mean around 227 ms in the study.
This is a tactile prey-handling behaviour, not a simple visual button press, but it is an extraordinary example of fast mammalian sensing and movement.
Larval zebrafish can perform very fast escape movements once a motor response begins. For looming visual threats, published work has cited response latencies around 400 ms, while acoustic and tactile startle responses can occur in only a few milliseconds.
The difference shows why the sensory pathway matters so much: “animal reaction time” is not one number.
In a visual reaching study, monkeys produced very fast eye movements, while reach movements following the target were around 250 ms in one condition. That is much closer to the scale of a human hand response than an insect escape reflex.
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