N-Back Working Memory Game

About N-Back

N-Back is one of the best known tasks in memory research. Letters appear one at a time in the middle of the screen. Whenever the current letter is the same as the letter that appeared n steps earlier, you press Match. The value of n depends on the round: 1-back means the previous letter, 2-back the one before that, and 3-back the one three steps ago.

A run has eight rounds. The first three rounds are 1-back, the middle ones 2-back and the final rounds 3-back. Each round shows 13 to 18 letters, each for about two seconds at first and about one and a half later. Matches are common, roughly one letter in three, so you have to keep attention the whole time.

How to play

1. Watch the letters as they appear. Keep the last n letters in your head and update them with every new letter.
2. When the current letter equals the one n steps back, press the Match button or the space bar.
3. Do not press for letters that do not match. Wrong presses cost points.
4. At the end of the round the result shows how many matches you found and how many wrong presses you made.

Letters appear one at a time. Press Match whenever the current letter is the same as the one shown n letters ago. Missing a match or pressing wrongly costs points.

How scoring works

The score is the number of matches you found minus the number of wrong presses, divided by the total number of matches in the round, with a minimum of 0. If a round had 5 matches and you found 4 with one wrong press, the score is 60.

The number of letters is 13 on the first round and 18 on the last. Each letter stays for 1.9 seconds on the easiest round and 1.2 seconds on the hardest. Each round has at least 3 matches. The letters are A, B, C, D, F, H, K and M, which are all different in sound. There is no answer timer, since the pace of the stream is fixed.

What it trains

The game trains working memory updating: keeping a rolling window of recent items and comparing the newest one with an older one. It is similar to following a conversation in which you need to remember what was said a few sentences ago.

It also trains sustained attention and the ability to ignore false alarms. Some players find the 3-back rounds extremely hard, and that is normal; they are among the hardest tasks in the game.

Tips for a higher score

• Rehearse the last n letters in your head as a short chain. For 2-back, think 'A, K' and replace it with 'K, M' when M appears.
• Compare the new letter with the oldest letter of the chain, not with the newest.
• If you are not sure, wait. A missed match costs less than a wrong press for most scores.
• Do not look back at what you missed. Focus on the current letter.
• On 3-back rounds, say the letters silently in a rhythm. Repeating them like a short song keeps them in order.

The idea behind it

The n-back task was introduced by Wayne Kirchner in 1958 and has since become a standard way to study working memory in psychology and neuroscience. Brain imaging studies show that it engages the dorsolateral prefrontal cortex and the parietal cortex, and the brain activity grows with n.

A 2008 study by Susanne Jaeggi and colleagues reported that training on a dual n-back task could raise fluid intelligence, and it received wide attention. Later studies and meta-analyses have not consistently confirmed this, so the game claims no transfer to intelligence. What training reliably improves is performance on the task itself and, in some studies, on closely similar memory tasks.

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Free, no account. Your best scores are saved on your device.