Correct
0
Best
—
Time
45
A fast focus test based on the classic flanker task from psychology. A row of arrows flashes up — tap the way the middle one points while its neighbours point the other way. 45 seconds, and the result card shows how much the distractors slowed you down.
A row of arrows appears in the middle of the screen. Look only at the arrow in the very centre and tap the big left or right button for the way it points, as fast as you can without mistakes. You have 45 seconds, and your score is the number of correct answers.
The arrows on either side are there to distract you. Sometimes they point the same way as the middle one, sometimes the opposite way, and sometimes they are plain bars that point nowhere. The middle arrow looks exactly like the others — same colour, same size — so you have to find it by its place in the row. The row also jumps up or down a little each time, so you cannot keep your eyes parked on one spot. Once you have 15 correct answers, the rows grow from five arrows to seven.
A correct answer brings the next row almost at once. A wrong answer shows a red ✕ and pauses for nearly a second before the next row, so guessing costs time. A tap that comes sooner than 0.12 seconds after a row appears is faster than anyone can actually see and decide, so it is marked "Too fast!" and counts as a mistake too. On a keyboard you can use the left and right arrow keys.
The clock starts when you press Start and runs on real time, even if you switch away. When it reaches zero the result card shows your score, your accuracy, your typical (median) reaction time on rows where all the arrows agree and on rows where the neighbours point the other way, and the difference between the two — your distraction cost. Save a good score to the Hall of Fame from that card.
Fix your eyes on the centre of the row before it appears, not on the buttons. The middle arrow is always in the middle, so the place to look is known in advance; the row only shifts up or down, never sideways. Keep both thumbs resting on the buttons so that answering is a small press, not a reach.
Do not try to beat the clock with guesses. A wrong answer costs almost a second of waiting, which is about as long as one or two careful answers, and a tap that comes before you could have seen the row counts as wrong as well. A steady rhythm with nearly every answer right scores far more than bursts of speed that end in errors. If you make a mistake, let it go — slowing down on purpose for the next row is the most common way people lose a run.
The rows where the side arrows point the other way are the real test. Your brain reads the whole row at once, and the neighbours push your thumb toward the wrong button before you have finished looking at the middle. The trick that works for most people is to read only the middle arrow and treat the rest as a frame. The neutral rows with plain bars are a useful check: if those feel much easier than the opposite rows, the side arrows are getting through. After 15 correct answers the rows grow to seven arrows, which makes the middle one harder to pick out, so expect to slow down a little.
This game is based on the flanker task that psychologists Barbara and Charles Eriksen described in 1974, originally with letters rather than arrows; the arrow version later became part of widely used attention tests. The extra time people need when the neighbours disagree is called the flanker or conflict effect, and the result card measures yours as the distraction cost — the difference between your median times on opposite and matching rows. Watching that number shrink is a good sign that your focus is getting sharper.