Spot the Odd One Game

About Odd One Out

Odd One Out fills the screen with a grid of items that are almost the same. One of them is different, and your task is to tap it. The items are either similar symbols, for example the letters O and Q or a smiling face and an upside-down face, or colour tiles in which a single tile has a slightly different shade.

The grid is three by three on the first levels and six by six at the end, so the search space grows from 9 to 36 items. From level 3 the colour tiles appear in about half of the rounds, and the difference in lightness shrinks from 20 points to 6 points. A wrong tap ends the round, so look before you tap.

How to play

1. Scan the grid for the item that does not fit. Do not start tapping before you have found it.
2. For symbols, look at the small detail that differs: a tail, a direction, a stroke.
3. For colour tiles, look for the tile that is a little lighter or darker than the rest.
4. Tap the odd one. The correct item is marked green, and a wrong tap is marked red.

A grid of almost identical items hides one that is different. Tap it as fast as you can. A wrong tap ends the round.

How scoring works

A right answer scores 100 and a wrong one 0, and in endless mode a right tap counts as a passed round. How fast you answer also feeds your time statistics. The time limit is 14 seconds on level 1 and 9 seconds on level 10.

The grid has 9 items on levels 1 to 3, 16 on levels 4 and 5, 25 on levels 6 to 8 and 36 on levels 9 and 10. Fifteen symbol pairs are in the pool, such as O and Q, b and d, and 6 and 9. In shade rounds, the odd tile differs by 20 points of lightness on level 1 and by 6 points on level 10 and may be lighter or darker.

What it trains

The game trains visual search and discrimination: finding a small difference in a crowd. This skill is useful when you proofread, compare documents, spot a faulty item in a row of parts or find a friend in a crowd.

It also trains patience and a systematic approach. Players who scan in a fixed order beat those who look around at random.

Tips for a higher score

• Scan systematically, row by row or in a spiral, so that you don't look at the same items twice.
• Let your eyes relax and soften your focus. The odd item sometimes pops out when you look at the whole grid.
• For symbols, compare each item with its neighbour, not with a mental picture of the target.
• For colours, squint slightly or look at the grid at an angle; differences in lightness show better in a blur.
• If you cannot find it, take another look at the areas you scanned fast at the beginning.

The idea behind it

Visual search has been studied intensively since Anne Treisman and Garry Gelade proposed feature integration theory in 1980. When the target differs from the others in a single obvious feature, such as colour, it seems to 'pop out' and the time to find it does not depend on the number of items. When it differs only slightly, search becomes serial and takes longer with every extra item.

John Duncan and Glyn Humphreys showed in 1989 that search gets harder when the target looks like the distractors and when the distractors differ from one another. That is why the game uses very similar items and why the shade differences shrink on the harder levels.

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