Time Gap Comparison Game
Two pairs of blinks. Which pause between them lasted longer?
About Gap
Gap is a comparison test. A circle blinks twice, quickly, with a short pause between the two blinks. After a moment it blinks twice again with a different pause. You decide whether the first pair or the second pair had the longer gap between its flashes.
Nothing else is on the screen, so there is no distance or size to rely on. The pauses range from 280 to roughly 1,700 milliseconds, and the difference between them shrinks as you move up the levels. At level 1 one pause is almost twice as long as the other. By level 10 it is only about ten percent longer, close to the limit of what people can reliably tell apart.
How to play
- Watch the first pair of flashes, labelled Pair 1. Pay attention to the empty time between the two blinks.
- After a short pause the second pair, labelled Pair 2, plays with a different gap.
- Choose which pair had the longer pause. You can also press 1 or 2 on a keyboard.
- The result note gives both pauses in milliseconds, so you can learn what a 10 or 20 percent difference feels like.
You see two pairs of quick flashes. Each pair has a pause between its two flashes. Decide whether the pause in the first or in the second pair was longer.
How scoring works
A right answer scores 100 and a wrong one 0, and the endless mode counts the round as passed if the answer is right. The longer pause is always longer than the shorter one by a fixed factor that goes from 1.9 on level 1 to 1.1 on level 10.
The base pause is drawn between 280 and 900 ms for every round, so there is no fixed value to memorize, and the longer pause can come first or second with equal chance. You have 8 seconds to answer after the second pair.
What it trains
The game trains temporal discrimination, the finest form of timing. It is what you use when you notice that a speaker pauses a little longer than usual, or that a traffic light seems to take longer today.
It is also a sensitive test of attention. When you let your mind drift between the pairs you lose the first interval, and training to hold a time in memory carries over to anything where timing matters, such as music, speech and sports.
Tips for a higher score
- Try to feel the gap as a stretch of silence, not as a number. Compare the two stretches directly, like two lengths of rope.
- Tap your finger silently during the first gap and again during the second, and compare the tapping rhythm.
- Do not try to count: such short pauses are shorter than a word.
- Stay calm after a miss. Close calls are hard even for musicians. Look at the numbers in the feedback to calibrate.
- If you play with sound on, you will also hear a short click on each flash. Combine both senses; hearing is generally more precise for timing than sight.
The idea behind it
In studies of interval discrimination, the smallest reliable difference between two durations is typically about 10 to 15 percent for intervals between a quarter of a second and a few seconds. That proportion, called the Weber fraction, is what the final levels approach. For auditory intervals the fraction can be lower, which is why musicians do well at it.
The empty-interval version used here, where two brief markers delimit a gap, is a classic paradigm in psychophysics since the work of Paul Fraisse and others in the 1950s. It is also known that an interval that is marked by sound seems longer than one marked by light of the same duration.
Frequently asked questions
What if both gaps feel equal?
Guess. The longer gap is always at least about ten percent longer, so you are usually slightly right even with a hunch.
Is there a time limit between the pairs?
No. The two pairs play one after the other. Only the answer has a time limit of 8 seconds.
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Free, no account. Your best scores are saved on your device.