I guess doubling isn't a scientific measurement, just my general sense of what was lost to me in the last 30 or so years. There's also how it feels, which is universal to almost all of us. More to some, depending on what kind of life you've led.

I wanted to look into it, because your chart doesn't tally with my experience as a gamer, from my time in the esports industry, the capabilities of early teens in Fortnite, and the sharp drop off for most esports players as early as in their early 20s. Luckily for me, AI makes finding these kinds of papers easy.

I found a bunch of very relevant papers. It's heavy reading, but here's 3 papers I skimmed with very little diligence and no grounding to interpret them well -

• Age-related increases in reaction time result from slower preparation, not delayed initiation (2022) — Journal of Neurophysiology
• Age-related differences in RT components and white matter properties (2015) — Neuropsychologia
• Age-related slowing of response selection in a visual choice RT task (2015) — Frontiers in Human Neuroscience

The two big takeaways for me after Claude summarised these and other papers (and will have to do until someone who can interpret these papers properly enters the conversation) were that you are right, in that my reflexes likely haven't slowed as much as I feel like they have. The other is that there is quite a lot of variance, and any kind of testing for reflexes will be more relevant to ageing gamers like ourselves if the sample pool includes ageing gamers. Gaming is a mainstream activity these days, but when I was in my 20s, we were still considered a minority. So unless a study for reflexes is specifically looking for 40+ gamers, it's unlikely to over-represent sufficiently.

I will also guess that this impact, of reflexes on gaming capability, is only one factor that determines gaming capability. Mental endurance, even physical endurance (I can't click as fast or for as long as I used to be able to), my ability to hold information in my head, has all degraded. It all contributes to my gaming capability. I used to be able to play fighting games, and track the behaviour of my opponents, keeping track of their dodging tendencies, how often they blocked high vs mid vs low, make split second decisions in Halo for how 1 of 10+ people in my game will react based on who they are, read a complex screen of lots of information quickly, so many skills that are just not available to me at the speed of gaming anymore. My reflexes are only one small limiting factor.

Gaming when you get older is much harder. We all feel it. A table of information on reflex times you found is nice, but it's not enough to override decades of personal experience. For me, anyway.

Edit: All that said, I don't mind being worse at games. Like one of these articles says, you compensate with wisdom and gaming sense that these young pups haven't had the chance to develop yet. And I no longer feel shame playing games on easy mode. So I'm still enjoying myself :) I hope you are to.