Focus and Attention Games
Stay sharp: ignore distractions, switch fast and spot the odd one out.
About this category
Attention is the gatekeeper of everything else you do. It decides what you notice, what you ignore and what you can stop yourself from doing. The six games in this category pull attention apart into the pieces that researchers have studied for more than a century: selecting, searching, inhibiting and discriminating.
Color Clash is the Stroop test in game form, and Go / No-Go tests whether you can stop an action. Number Order and Odd One Out measure the speed and care of visual search. Mirror asks for reflections and rotations in your head, and Pitch Match sharpens your ear.
Rounds are short, and feedback is immediate: you see which choice was right and how much time you needed.
The 6 Focus games
Why train this?
Attention is not a single muscle, so there is no single exercise for it. People who are good at filtering distractions are not necessarily fast searchers, and fast reactions do not guarantee good self-control. That is why this category mixes different tasks, each of which isolates one piece.
We make no claim that these games will improve your concentration at work or at school. Studies of attention training show that people mostly improve at the task they practise. What the games do offer is a way of noticing how your attention behaves, for example how much slower you become when a distraction is present.
How to improve
- Slow down to speed up. A fraction of a second of care before an answer often saves more time than it costs.
- Scan in a fixed order, row by row, so you never search the same place twice.
- Keep your gaze relaxed and use peripheral vision for search tasks.
- For inhibition tasks, keep your finger just above the button instead of resting on it.
- Take breaks. Attention drops after a few minutes of intense focus.
- Look at your results over several days. A single bad round says little about you, a trend says more.