Stop After N Seconds Game
No clock. Tap Stop when you think the time is up.
About Timing
Timing turns the question around. Instead of showing you a duration, it names one: 'Stop after 7 seconds'. You press Start and then press Stop at the moment you believe that time has passed. There is no timer, counter or progress bar on the screen to help you. Only your inner clock is left.
The target time is a friendly number on the first levels, like 3, 4, 5, 6 or 10 seconds, and on higher levels it can be anything between 2.5 and 14 seconds in half-second steps. Because the result is shown as a number with two decimals after you stop, you learn at once how close your sense of time is, and you can make a note of how your guesses are biased.
How to play
- Read the target at the top: 'Stop after N seconds'.
- Press Start. The text changes to 'Running…' but no time is shown.
- Press Stop when you think N seconds have passed. On a keyboard you can focus the Stop button and press space or enter.
- Your measured time appears with two decimals, together with your score and the target.
Press Start, then press Stop when you think the given number of seconds has passed. There is no clock on screen. Do not count out loud if you want to test your inner clock!
How scoring works
The score is based on the ratio of your time to the target, on a logarithmic scale. A perfect time scores 100, and the score reaches 0 at a factor of about 2.6 on level 1 (stopping at 4 seconds when 10 was asked) and 1.7 on level 10 (7 seconds instead of 12). A small error is cheap and a big error is expensive: stopping 10 percent early at level 1 still earns about 90 points.
If you wait more than three times the target plus two and a half seconds, the round times out with 0 points. The round time limit does not use the normal on-screen countdown, because that would give away the answer.
What it trains
This is called time production in psychology: producing an interval of a given length. It trains the internal pacemaker that you also use when you cook without a timer, wait for a friend, give a speech with a time limit, or know how long a minute is.
It is hard to cheat since you cannot look at a clock. Players who do well often have a good sense of rhythm, such as a steady counting speed or a feeling for their own pulse.
Tips for a higher score
- Find a personal reference. A relaxed breath is about four seconds in and out, and a resting heart beats about once a second. Use whichever feels reliable.
- Do not rush the first second. People tend to stop early, because the beginning of an interval feels longer than it is.
- Use the numbers in the feedback. If you are 15 percent short on average, add 15 percent next time.
- Longer targets give more room for drift. Count in chunks, for example 5 sets of 2 seconds for a 10 second target.
- For a real test of the inner clock, try not to count at all and just feel the time pass.
The idea behind it
Time production tasks were among the first experiments in psychology of time, and they show regularities that are close to those of time estimation: errors grow in proportion to the interval, and the average tends to be a little short or long depending on arousal. In a classic result, a faster internal pacemaker, for example caused by a higher body temperature or by excitement, makes time estimates longer and productions shorter.
The same ideas underlie the pacemaker-accumulator models of timing, in which a counter collects pulses from an internal clock. That structure offers an explanation of why people can count steadily when they concentrate, yet drift when their attention goes elsewhere.
Frequently asked questions
Is the time measured exactly?
The time from your Start press to your Stop press is measured with the browser's high-resolution timer, so the error is a few milliseconds at most.
Why does the timer bar not show?
A countdown would let you read the time from the bar. For this game it is left out on purpose.
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