Verbal memory test

No study has scored this game, where you keep going until three mistakes, so your score has no published average. The game does share its task with studies of spotting words you have seen before, and one of them prints two shares that this test also records^[1]. In it, 42 young adults in Portugal saw Portuguese words, each coming back once after 1 to 32 other words, mixed with new ones. Your result sets your share of seen words called seen beside theirs, as a mark and not a ranking: the study was small, in another language, and its words came back only once.

Your score itself is set beside your own earlier results. How we measured this shows how many of the words you had seen you said you had, and how many new words you called seen. Those two shares tell you more than the score does: a high score from careful answers is different from one from guessing seen every time.

The words come from a list of the most common words in the language of this page, with names, rude words and very short words taken out, and the commonest few words left out as too easy to confuse. Whether the next word is one you have seen is drawn at random: never when nothing could come back, rarely at first, and then more often as the list of seen words grows, until it is about one draw in two.

Your score is the number of right answers, which counts new words you called new as well as seen words you called seen. From the same answers we work out two shares: the share of the words you had seen that you called seen, and the share of the new words that you called seen. A run that shows every word of the list ends there, and the result is marked so that you know your true score may be higher.

An answer that comes from a script, or from a key held down, is left out: the word stays and no life is lost. Nothing about your answers leaves this browser: the result is saved here and never goes into a link. You can read about us to see who makes the site.

This kind of task asks you to recognise a word, not to recall it, which is much easier. What makes it hard is that every word is familiar from everyday life, so the feeling of knowing a word tells you nothing. You have to remember seeing it here.

• Attaching a picture or a short story to a word makes it easier to recognise later.
• Saying the word silently, once, fixes it better than only reading it.
• Words that sound or look alike are easy to mix up, which is a common reason for a lost life.
• Tiredness and distraction make every word feel familiar.

Give each new word a second of attention: picture it, or link it to the word before. When a word feels familiar, ask yourself whether you saw it in this test or know it from elsewhere. Take the test on a few different days and watch your own ticks on the ruler, rather than a single score.