Memory · verbal recognition memory
Verbal Memory Test
A word appears — have you seen it already, or is it new?
No IQ score. No cognitive age. No percentile.
Memory · verbal recognition memory
Verbal Memory
A word appears. Have you seen it already this run, or is it new? The pile grows — and the higher you climb, the more the words start to look alike.
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Free to play here. On Train, part of Core.
What this measures
Your verbal recognition memory — how many words you can keep track of as the list grows. It is not an intelligence test and does not predict anything away from this game.
The words pile up as you go.
Where this task comes from
Showing one item at a time and asking only “have you seen this already?” is the continuous recognition task, and it is read through two numbers rather than one: the hits, where you correctly said seen, and the false alarms, where you said seen about a word that was new. Snodgrass and Corwin (1988) set out the arithmetic that keeps those two apart, and the reason it matters is simple: answering seen to everything produces a perfect hit rate and tells you nothing.
How to read your number
Your number is how long you kept the growing list straight before the wrong calls ran out — on this list, in this language, today. There is no norming sample behind it, so it carries no percentile and compares you to nobody. A run that ends early after a streak of confident guesses and a run that ends early after careful ones look identical from the outside; only you know which you played.
What changes your number
How much you read in English moves it, because a word you have met a thousand times behaves differently from one you have not. Sleep and time of day move it. So does the list itself getting longer, which is the point: the task is designed to become unmanageable, and where it becomes unmanageable is the reading. Practice moves it too, at this task and at nothing else.
Questions
- What does this measure?
- Your verbal recognition memory — how many words you can keep track of as the list grows. It is not an intelligence test and does not predict anything away from this game.
- How do I play?
- A word appears. If you have already seen it in this run, choose Seen; if it is the first time, choose New. Every word you see becomes part of the pile, so it gets harder the longer you last.
- How does scoring work?
- You get a point for every correct call. You have three lives, and a wrong call costs one. Your score is how many words you get through before you run out of lives.
- Does this make me smarter?
- No. You get better at this task, which is a real and honest thing. We do not claim it transfers to work, school, or IQ.