Selective attention · Focus
Flanker Test
Five arrows land at once. Answer the middle one and ignore its neighbours.
No IQ score. No cognitive age. No percentile we can’t source.
Selective attention · Focus
Flanker
Five arrows. Answer the middle one, ignore its neighbours.
Your best cost · —
Trains ignoring what sits beside the thing you are looking at, in this task.
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Free to play here. On Train, part of Core.
What this measures
This measures selective attention in this task: how much the arrows either side of the middle one slow you down, and how often they pull you into the wrong answer.
Play the measured block for your flanker cost, close the gap in the crowding gauntlet, or sprint the clock, then challenge a friend to the same arrays.
How to get better
You mostly get better at this task — holding your eyes on the centre of the row, letting the neighbours sit in the periphery unread, and answering before the pull arrives. That is a real, honest thing to practise, and it is why accuracy on the mismatched trials matters more than one fast call. It makes you better at this task on this screen.
Questions
- What is the flanker task?
- Five arrows appear in a row and you answer the direction of the middle one. When its neighbours point the same way, you are fast. When they point the other way, you are slower and you make more mistakes, because the neighbours are read whether you want them to be or not. Barbara and Charles Eriksen published the effect in 1974 and it has been on selective-attention research batteries ever since.
- What does this test measure?
- Selective attention in this task: how much the arrows either side of the target slow you down, and how often they pull you into the wrong answer. It is a reading of one narrow thing on one screen, not a statement about your attention in general.
- What is the flanker cost, and why is it the number?
- It is your median time on the mismatched trials minus your median on the matched ones. It is the number because a constant lag from your device sits inside both medians and cancels when one is subtracted from the other. Your raw speed does not travel between a phone and a laptop; the gap between the two medians does. It is still a difference of two noisy numbers, so read it as a wide band rather than a precise score.
- Why did my run give me no number at all?
- Two reasons, and the screen says which. Either fewer than eight clean trials survived in one of the two cells, or your accuracy on the mismatched trials was under about 80 per cent. A reaction-time cost computed from answers that were mostly wrong is not a measurement of anything, so we print nothing rather than print something that looks like a number.
- What are the three modes?
- Quick test is the measurement: a short warm-up, then forty-eight fixed trials, half of them mismatched, at one spacing and one response window. The crowding gauntlet closes the gap between the arrows a tenth at a time and tightens the window with it, and one wrong call, missed window or jumped gun ends the run. The thirty-second sprint holds the spacing still and raises the proportion of mismatched trials as your combo climbs.
- Does the spacing between the arrows matter?
- It is the whole difficulty dial, and it is the 1974 experiment's own manipulation rather than one we invented: the closer the neighbours sit to the target, the more they cost. That is why the gauntlet closes the aperture plates on screen by exactly the amount the arrows move — what got harder is something you can see.