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Multiple Stimuli is a colour-sequence span test. Coloured tiles flash one at a time from a palette of six, then you tap the colours back in the same order. Every round the sequence is brand new and one colour longer, so nothing carries over from the round before — each round is a clean measure of how many items in order you can hold.
Pick a speed — slow, normal or fast — and press Start.
Watch the colours flash one at a time; the dots underneath count how far through you are.
Tap the six colour buttons in the order you saw them.
Get the whole sequence right and the next one is one colour longer, starting at three.
One wrong tap ends the run. Your score is the round you reached.
Round one is three colours from a palette of six, shown at 1, 0.7 or 0.4 seconds each. Each round is a brand-new sequence one colour longer.
The first wrong tap ends the run. Your score is the round you reached (round 5 means a sequence of seven), saved as your best in this browser.
Serial-order visual working memory: holding which item came where in a sequence. Because six colours repeat within a sequence, you have to remember order, not just which colours appeared — which is the harder and more useful half of the skill.
Reproducing a sequence of colours in order is a serial-order span task, the visual counterpart of digit span. Adults typically manage around five to seven items, and Nelson Cowan's review of the evidence puts the core limit nearer four chunks, with grouping doing the rest.
Naming the colours as they appear is the most effective strategy for most people, because it moves the list into the verbal rehearsal loop that Baddeley and Hitch described — a store that is much better at keeping order than visual memory is.
Name the colours as they flash — 'red, blue, red, green'. The verbal loop holds a list far better than a visual image does.
Chunk in threes: 'red-blue-red, green-yellow-white'. Two chunks of three are easier than six separate items.
Watch for repeats. A colour appearing twice in a row is easy to collapse into one when you replay.
Start on slow. Faster flashes leave less time to name each colour, which is exactly where the errors come from.
So that each round measures span rather than rehearsal. In Simon the sequence grows by one and replays from the start, which lets you rehearse; here every round is new.
Most adults reproduce around five to seven items in order, the classic span range. Reaching round five here means a sequence of seven.
No. It is purely visual, so you can play with the sound off.
Related but different. Dual N-Back requires continuous updating of a moving window; this is reproduction of a whole sequence.