Visual Memory
A grid of tiles lights up for a second; tap the ones that lit. Each level adds a tile and the grid grows. Your level against a normal curve with mean 9 and SD 2.5 from Human Benchmark's aggregated results.
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Tiles light up for a second. Tap the ones that lit. Each level adds a tile and the grid grows. Three wrong tiles in one level costs a life; three lives and it ends. Your score is the level you reached.
Play until you run out of lives to see your level.
Related tests
About this test
Visual memory flashes a pattern of tiles on a grid, then asks you to click the tiles that lit up. Levels add tiles and grid size until you run out of lives; the score is the level reached. Human Benchmark's aggregated user data put the median around level 9, and the module uses a normal curve with mean 9 and SD 2.5. The sample is people who take memory tests, not the general population.
Luck and Vogel (1997) found visual working memory holds about four objects at once, which sounds like a contradiction with level 9. It is not: people remember tile patterns as shapes (an L, a diagonal, a cluster), so a dozen tiles become three or four objects. Scores depend on how well you group.
What is a good visual memory score?
Level 9 is the median of the Human Benchmark sample. Level 12 or above is roughly the top 10% on our curve; level 6 or below is in the bottom 10%. Each level adds a tile, so one level is a real difference.
How much can visual working memory hold?
About four objects at once, with some variation between people (Luck & Vogel 1997). The test rewards grouping tiles into shapes, which turns many tiles into few objects.
Why did I fail a level I had seen fine?
The pattern is shown briefly and the grid grows. Most failures come from misplacing a tile by one square, not from forgetting it. Fixating on the centre of the grid rather than scanning helps.
Percentiles above come from the same parameters the Visual Memory module uses. See the methodology for how they are calculated.