What Does the Timer Do in Anki?

From Anki's documentation:
https://apps.ankiweb.net/docs/manual.html#general

>Anki monitors how long it takes you to answer each question so that it can show you how long was spent studying each day. The time taken does not influence scheduling. If you take longer than 60 seconds, Anki assumes you have walked away from your computer or have been distracted, and limits the recorded time to 60 seconds, so that you don’t end up with inaccurate statistics. The ignore answer times… option allows you to adjust the cutoff threshold. The minimum cutoff is 30 seconds.

If show answer timer is checked, Anki will display the current time taken for each card in the study area.

* Originally posted by Andrew Fluent Forever.