Verbal Memory

The Verbal Memory test shows you one word at a time from a bank of roughly 300 common English words. For each word you make a single call: SEEN if it has already appeared this round, or NEW if it has not. You start with three lives, every wrong call costs one, and your score is the number of words you survived.

This is a recognition-memory task — the "old/new" paradigm memory researchers have used for decades. You are not asked to recall words from nothing, only to judge familiarity, which sounds easy but degrades in a very particular way: as your mental "seen" list grows, similar-feeling words start to interfere with each other. Psychologists call this interference, and it is the real opponent here, not vocabulary.

The test also tightens the screws as you go. Early on most words are new, so NEW is a safe default; but the chance of a repeat climbs from about 30% toward more than 60% as the round progresses, so guessing stops working and only genuine recognition survives. When the run ends you get a recap of every word you slipped on — often revealing a pattern, like abstract nouns or words that resemble ones you actually saw. Your best score is stored in your browser and nothing leaves your device.