[aborington]

See the following paper for why they are is no strong evidence for a decrease in reaction times.

"Is there any evidence of historical slowing of reaction time? No, unless we compare apples and oranges" (https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S016028961...)

>In this paper, we reconsider a tendency of historical slowing of simple reactions to visual stimuli declared by Woodley et al. (in press). We begin by reconstructing a pendulum similar to that used by Galton and question whether such an instrument could indeed be appropriate for purposes of RT measurement. Next, we screened the other studies used in Woodley's meta-analysis and note the important properties of these studies that make the RTs that they report incomparable to each other. We claim that there is no evidence of the trend of historical increase in RT after these differences between studies are taken into account. Overall, we conclude that any cross-study comparison of RTs is uninformative and cannot provide any evidence for speculating on the topic of historical change in intelligence.

another interesting paper on this topic is:

"The magical numbers 7 and 4 are resistant to the Flynn effect: No evidence for increases in forward or backward recall across 85 years of data" (https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S016028961...)

> Based on Digit Span Forward (DSF) and Digit Span Backward (DSB) adult test scores across 85 years of data (respective Ns of 7,077 and 6,841), the mean adult verbal STMC was estimated at 6.56 (± 2.39), and the mean adult verbal WMC was estimated at 4.88 (± 2.58). No increasing trend in the STMC or WMC test scores was observed from 1923 to 2008, suggesting that these two cognitive processes are unaffected by the Flynn effect.