Measured in words answered ยท higher is better
Verbal Memory Test
One word at a time. Seen it before, or is it new? Three lives.
Before you start
The median on mouse is 44 pts. Run the test and we will place you against it.
Compared against
Two large buttons, so phone and desktop play the same. Reading speed on a small screen still costs a little.
The other device classes
Trackpad
Touchscreen
Curve is a fitted baseline plus 0 first attempts recorded here. The baseline is a curve, not a sample: no part of it is a real person. Baseline is an estimate: centred on a plausible span for a running recognition task with a growing word pool. No published dataset was found for it. Per-device offsets are extrapolated, not measured. The baseline is dropped once a device class holds 5,000 real first attempts. See the full distribution.
Seen it before?
One word at a time. Say whether it has appeared before in this run. Three lives, and the pool of seen words keeps growing.
Understanding your score
| Band | pts | What it means |
|---|---|---|
| Exceptional | 110 and above | Holding a very large working set. |
| Very good | 75 to 109 | Well above average. |
| Good | 55 to 74 | Above the middle. |
| Average | 35 to 54 | Where most results land. |
| Below average | 20 to 34 | The pool grows faster than it feels like it should. |
| Low | 19 and below | Usually a strategy problem, not a memory one. |
Why this is harder than it sounds
For the first twenty words the task feels trivial. Then the pool of words you have seen grows past the point where you can hold it, and the question changes from remembering to judging: this word feels familiar, but is that because I saw it here, or because it is a common word?
That shift is the actual subject of the test. It measures recognition memory and, more specifically, how well you distinguish genuine memory from mere familiarity. It is the same distinction that makes eyewitness identification unreliable.
What works
Answer on your first instinct. Deliberating past a second or two makes people worse, not better, because rethinking replaces a memory judgement with a plausibility judgement.
Notice the unusual words. A rare or striking word is easy to place with confidence, and each one you are sure about reduces the size of the fog.
Accept that you will lose. The word pool grows without limit, so everyone fails eventually. The score is where that happened, not whether it did.
Reading the result
Scores on this test are strongly right-skewed. Most people finish between 35 and 55, and a small number go far past 100. That shape is why the median is a better reference point than the average here, and why we show you both.
Being tired hits this test harder than it hits the timing tests. Recognition judgements degrade early under fatigue, and this one asks for a few hundred of them in a row.
Familiarity is not memory
Recognition works through two routes. One is recollection, where you can place where you saw something. The other is familiarity, a bare sense that you have encountered it before, with no context attached. Early in this test recollection carries you. Once the pool grows past a few dozen words, only familiarity is left.
Familiarity is easy to fool. Common words feel familiar because you read them constantly, not because they appeared here, and that is where most errors come from. Rare words carry a much cleaner signal, which is why noticing them is the single most useful strategy.
This is the same mechanism behind the false memories that make eyewitness identification unreliable. A face can feel familiar because it was in the room, or because it was on a poster, and the feeling is identical from the inside.
Questions
- Why do I misjudge common words more often?
- Because familiarity is not specific to this test. You read common words constantly, so they feel familiar regardless of whether they appeared here. Rare and unusual words carry a much more reliable signal.
- What is a good verbal memory score?
- Most people finish between 35 and 55 words. Above 75 is well above average. Scores above 110 are uncommon and usually mean a deliberate approach to tracking the pool.
- Why do I start making mistakes so suddenly?
- Because the pool of seen words keeps growing while your capacity does not. At some point familiarity stops being a reliable signal, and errors arrive quickly once it does.
- Is it better to guess new or seen when unsure?
- It depends on where you are. Early on, most words are new, so guessing new is safer. Later the pool of seen words is much larger and the odds invert. Most people keep guessing new for too long.