N-Back Working Memory Test
The N-back is the standard working-memory task from cognitive psychology. A square lights up on a 3×3 grid and a letter is shown (and spoken, when your browser supports speech) every 2.5 seconds; your job is to signal whenever the current stimulus matches the one from N steps back — press A for a position match, L for a letter match. Start with single 1-back, which feels trivial, then climb: 2-back is genuinely hard and dual 2-back (tracking both channels at once) is the version used in the famous training studies. Scoring follows signal-detection logic: hits minus false alarms, so mashing the keys earns nothing. Pick N from 1 to 3, choose position-only, letter-only or dual mode, set the session length, and your best score per setting is kept on this device.
Runs 100% in your browser — your puzzles never leave your device.
Read the full guide to this tool
Notes
- Scoring is d-prime-flavored: your hit rate on real matches minus your false-alarm rate on non-matches, per channel — a strategy of pressing constantly scores zero, not 100.
- Expect a cliff between 1-back and 2-back: 1-back is near-perfect for most people, while untrained dual 2-back scores are commonly below 50%. That cliff is the point of the task.
- Whether N-back training transfers to general fluid intelligence is still debated in the literature; what is uncontroversial is that you get better at N-back itself with practice.
- Runs 100% in your browser — your words and puzzles never leave your device.
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