Sequence Memory Test: Watch the Lights, Repeat the Pattern

The board is a 3×3 grid of nine tiles. Press Start and watch: on level 1, one tile lights up and you tap it. On level 2, that same tile lights up again, followed by a new one, and you tap both in order. Every level of the sequence memory test replays the whole pattern from the beginning and adds one more step at the end, so the sequence you have to hold grows by exactly one tile.

Each tile stays lit for about half a second, with a short gap before the next one, and the grid does not accept taps while the pattern is playing. When the label changes from Watch to Your turn, tap the tiles in the order you saw them. The same tile never lights twice in a row, but it can come back later in the pattern, so longer runs often return to a corner you already visited.

One wrong tile ends the run. There are no extra lives, which keeps the result simple: your score is the length of the longest pattern you repeated correctly. You can play with a mouse, with your finger on a touchscreen, or with the keyboard, pressing Tab to move between tiles and Enter or Space to choose one.

Your score counts steps. If you clear level 7 and then miss a tile on level 8, you repeated a seven-step pattern, so your score is 7. If the very first tile goes wrong, the score is 0. Speed plays no part, only how long a pattern you carried in the right order. Your best score is saved on this device, so you can try to beat it next time.

Each result falls into one of five bands: 0 to 4 steps, 5 to 7, 8 to 10, 11 to 14, and 15 or more. The text for each band describes what that length of pattern looks like in this sequence memory game and suggests one thing to try on your next run. The bands describe your attempt; they do not rank you against other people, and this page has no data to do that with anyway.

Read any single score as a snapshot. The pattern is random each time and one slip ends the run, so two attempts a minute apart can land several steps apart. Your best shows what you can do on a good run; the scores you reach again and again show your steady level.

Repeating a sequence of locations is a classic task in psychology. The best-known version is the Corsi block-tapping task, usually credited to Philip Corsi, who described it in the early 1970s at McGill University in Canada. In the classic setup, an examiner taps a series of blocks fixed to a board, and the person taps the same blocks in the same order. The sequences get longer until the person can no longer repeat them correctly.

The Corsi task is often described as a spatial counterpart to the digit span tasks used in Wechsler scales, where people repeat lists of numbers. Researchers use it to study spatial working memory, the short-term system that keeps track of where things are. In the influential 1974 model of working memory proposed by Alan Baddeley and Graham Hitch, this kind of information is handled by a part they called the visuospatial sketchpad, separate from a loop that holds words and sounds.

The grow-by-one idea also reached toy shelves. Simon, the electronic game with four colored buttons released in the late 1970s, played a pattern and added one step every round, and many Simon-style games have followed. This page borrows from both, with no claim to be a lab measure.

Attention matters most on a sequence memory test. You have to catch every step as it flashes past, and a single glance away during the replay can cost you a tile you would otherwise have kept. Tiredness, poor sleep, background noise and a buzzing phone all make the pattern harder to hold, which is why the same person can score quite differently in the morning and late at night.

The pattern itself matters too. Sequences that form a clean shape, such as a line along the top row or a loop around the edge, are easier to keep than ones that zigzag across the center or return to the same tile several times. Since every pattern is random, some runs are simply kinder than others. Your device plays a smaller role: on a phone, a finger can land on the neighboring tile, which counts as a mistake even if you remembered the pattern perfectly.

The most useful tip is to give each tile a name. As the pattern plays, say the positions silently in your head, such as top left, center, bottom right, or number the tiles 1 to 9 like a phone keypad and repeat the digits. Turning positions into words lets your verbal memory share the load with your visual memory, and that often makes long patterns easier to keep.

Another approach is to trace the path. Instead of storing separate flashes, picture the sequence as one line moving across the grid, like drawing a shape without lifting your pen. Break long patterns into chunks of three or four steps, such as a corner, a diagonal and a jump back to the middle, and remember the chunks rather than every single tile.

Use the replay to your advantage. Because each level starts from the beginning, the first part of the pattern is the part you already know, so you can check it against what you remember and save your full attention for the new step at the end. When it is your turn, tap at a steady pace; rushing can cost you a tile you actually remembered.

Sequence memory is not a fixed number. Scores shift with how rested you are, how hard the random pattern is and how warmed up you feel, and because one wrong tile ends the run, a single slip can cut a good attempt short. Playing a few runs and looking at your usual range is a better guide than any one result.

The sequence memory test on this page is a game for fun and self-tracking. It is not a medical, clinical or IQ test, and it cannot diagnose anything about memory or attention. If you or someone close to you has noticed changes in memory that worry you, talk to a doctor, who can look at the full picture with proper tools.