Score
0
Best
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A few dots flash, then every dot looks the same and they all start moving. When they stop, tap the ones that flashed.
At the start of each round a few dots flash. Then they all look identical and every one of them starts moving, drifting across the box, turning at random and sliding straight through one another. When they stop, tap the ones that flashed and press Done. Get every one right and the next round adds another target, more decoys to hide among, more speed and a longer chase; miss any and you lose one of your three lives. Nothing is ever hidden and you can watch the whole time, so this is not a memory test — it measures how many moving things you can keep your attention on at once. Guessing will not carry you: even the second round is a one-in-fifty-six shot, and the odds fall off a cliff after that. Your score is the number of targets you correctly followed across the whole run.
Do not look at the targets. Look at the middle of them. The instinct is to flick your eyes from one dot to the next, checking each in turn, and it fails at exactly the moment it matters: while you are checking the fourth, the first two cross paths and swap in your mind. Park your gaze near the centre of the group and let peripheral vision hold all of them at once. It feels like doing less and it tracks more.
What actually kills a round is a near miss between a target and a decoy. When two dots slide over each other you have a fraction of a second to keep them apart, and if your attention is elsewhere at that instant the two identities quietly trade places without you ever noticing you lost one. So spend your attention on crossings rather than spreading it evenly over time: when the box is spread out you can relax, and when dots converge you cannot.
Group them into a shape rather than a list. Three targets remembered as a long thin triangle survive far better than three separate dots, because the shape deforms continuously and you can feel when a corner is wrong. This is the single change that moves most people from three targets to four or five, and it is also why the round gets suddenly harder when a target drifts far from the others — a shape with an outlier is really two things to hold.
When you know you have lost one, do not spend the rest of the round hunting it. You cannot recover a lost target by staring, and trying costs you the ones you still have. Hold the others cleanly, then guess the last one from where it should roughly be; a round where you keep three of four and guess the fourth still passes surprisingly often, while a round where you panic loses all of them.