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The working-memory task used in cognitive labs. Squares light up one at a time — press when the current one matches the square from n steps back, and n keeps climbing.
One of nine squares lights up each trial. Press the button if that square is the same as the one n trials ago. Ignore it otherwise — doing nothing is the correct answer roughly seven times out of ten.
You start at 1-back, which is just "same as the last one". Ten trials in a row without a mistake and n goes up by one, so 2-back asks you to compare against the square before last, 3-back the one before that, and so on up to 6-back.
You have three lives. Missing a real match costs one, and pressing when there was no match costs one too. Once n reaches its ceiling the trials start getting shorter instead, so the run always ends eventually.
The clock is real time, so leaving the tab does not buy you thinking time — come back and that trial has already been scored as no press. Your score is the number of trials you survive.
The mistake almost everyone makes at the start is trying to hold a picture of the whole grid. That fails by 3-back because the picture has to be redrawn every second. What works instead is holding a short ordered list and updating it: when a new square arrives, say its position to yourself, drop the oldest, and keep the order. You are not remembering a scene, you are running a queue.
Give the nine cells names you can say quickly — top-left, top, top-right and so on, or just the numbers one to nine as on a phone keypad. Saying them under your breath is not a crutch; it is the whole technique. Verbal rehearsal survives interruptions far better than a visual image, and at 4-back and above it is the only thing that holds up.
Remember that not pressing is the answer roughly seventy percent of the time, so uncertainty should default to silence. A false press costs exactly as much as a missed match, and pressing out of doubt is how most runs actually end. If you genuinely do not know, let it go and make sure your queue is clean for the next one — one lost match is cheaper than a corrupted list.
The level change is the trap. Every time n goes up the window restarts empty, and the first few trials of a new level cannot be matches at all — but your brain is still holding the old rhythm and will fire on a repeat that is now the wrong distance back. Consciously reset at the level-up message: clear the queue, note the new n, and treat the first few squares as pure loading.