Sequence Memory Test
Tiles light up, one after another. Tap them back in the same order. Each level adds one, until the order slips.
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Bar widths show roughly how many people land in each band on the provisional curve. Your number is the levels you completed: the longest sequence you tapped back in order. Each tile lights for just under half a second; the sequence grows by one tile a level and plays again in full every time; one wrong tap ends the run.
What moves it
Chunking. Nobody holds fourteen taps; they hold a few short paths. Look for shapes on the grid, an L, a diagonal, a bounce, and let the shapes carry the order.
Rehearsal. The sequence plays again from the start at every level, so the old part is a replay you already know. Tap along in your head while it plays and only the new tile is really new.
Sleep and attention. Working memory is the first thing a short night takes. A slip at level six on a tired day is not a smaller memory, it is a lapse; the run ends on the first wrong tap, so play it rested.
What this measures
This is a serial recall task, and order is the whole game. The visual memory test one door over asks what you saw; this one asks what happened first, second, third, and order is the more fragile cargo. The tiles never move, only the path through them grows. Psychology measures the same ability with the Corsi block task, tapped out on wooden blocks since 1972, and the spans it finds run shorter than digit spans: order costs.
The sequence replays in full at every level and grows by one tile, so every round hands you a free rehearsal of everything you already hold plus exactly one new step. One wrong tap ends the run. The single strike is a design choice: it keeps every level worth the same, keeps a run inside a minute, and makes the score the longest sequence you actually held rather than the longest one you survived to see.
Players who go deep are not holding fourteen tiles, they are holding a few shapes: an L, a zigzag, a bounce off the corner. Grouping is the lever on every span test, and the memory guide explains why it works; the curve behind the percentile and its measured count are on the Method page.
Questions people ask
It is the number of levels you completed: the longest sequence you tapped back in the right order. Level one is one tile; every level adds one more and plays the whole sequence again from the start. One wrong tap ends the run, and the level you slip on does not count. Nothing else is scored: how fast you tap is on the card, but it does not move the number.
Because the rule fits in one sentence, and so does Simon's. A second chance at each level would make the score near your limit partly a coin toss, and it would make a run at level fifteen take minutes; one strike keeps a run around a minute and every level worth the same. The number-memory test on this site gives two tries a length, for a different reason: a digit span is scored that way in the clinic.
Nobody has measured it properly, so the curve here is a guess, re-centered on Human Benchmark's saved scores and shifted down one level for self-selection: 8 is the middle, 12 is a long sequence, 16 is rare. Expect to land around your digit span or above it: the sequence replays in full at every level, so you rehearse the old part each time and only learn one new tile. The curve is an assumption until humanlag has its own runs.
Nothing stops you, and nothing can: a pen, a numbered sketch of the grid, a friend calling the tiles. Taps while the sequence plays are refused, but the test measures what you hold, and only you know whether you held it. The score is yours to keep honest.
Because every level adds a fixed load to a store with a firm ceiling, and the replay carries you exactly as far as that ceiling reaches. One tile past it, there is always one step with no home. The wall does not move with effort; it moves with grouping. Hold pairs and shapes instead of single tiles and the same ceiling carries a longer sequence; that, not concentration, is what the players above you are doing.
It starts as an assumption worth 1000 runs, shaped from published norms, and every run played here adds one to it, everyone in one pool. The Method page says which norms, how the percentile is read, and how many runs this test has measured so far.