Verbal Memory
Words appear one at a time. Say SEEN if it has come up before, NEW if not. Three mistakes end the test. Your score against a normal curve with mean 55 and SD 25, a rough fit to Human Benchmark's median of about 50.
Words appear one at a time. Say SEEN if the word has already come up in this test, NEW if it has not. Three mistakes end it. Your score is the number of right answers.
Play until the third strike to see your score.
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About this test
Verbal memory shows words one at a time. For each one you say whether you have seen it earlier in this run or whether it is new. Three mistakes end the test; the score is the number of words you got through. Human Benchmark reports a median around 50 words, and the module compares you to a normal curve with mean 55 and SD 25, clamped at zero. That sample is self-selected.
Recognition is much easier than recall. Standing (1973) showed people recognise thousands of pictures after a single viewing. Words are harder because common words all feel familiar, and the test is built from common words. Most runs end not from forgetting a word but from a new word that felt seen.
What is a good verbal memory score?
Around 50 words is the median of the Human Benchmark sample. 80 or more is roughly the top 15% on our curve; under 30 is the bottom 15%. One lapse costs a third of your lives, so scores are noisy.
Why does every word start to feel familiar?
Because they are common words you have read thousands of times. The test asks whether you saw the word in this run, and that source memory is weaker than the sense of familiarity. Attaching each word to the one before it helps.
Is recognition memory the same as recall?
No. Recognition (have I seen this) is far stronger than recall (what was it). Standing (1973) found near-perfect recognition for 10,000 pictures. Recall of the same material would be a small fraction.
Percentiles above come from the same parameters the Verbal Memory module uses. See the methodology for how they are calculated.