Free spatial reasoning game — instant play, no signup, no download
Visual Grid Memory lights cells on a grid, hides them, and asks you to click the ones that were lit. It is a clean visuospatial span test — the grid gives you a coordinate system, which makes it easier than open-field tasks and easier to compare between runs.
Watch which cells light up.
The lights go out.
Click every cell that was lit.
Correct rounds add more lit cells.
Your span is the most cells you reproduced correctly.
Choose a 4 × 4, 5 × 5 or 6 × 6 grid. Round one lights three tiles; each round adds one more. The pattern is shown for 0.8 seconds plus 0.2 seconds per tile.
Select the tiles in any order. If every tile you pick was lit, the next round starts; one wrong tile ends the run. Your score is the round reached, saved as your best in this browser.
Visuospatial working memory for simultaneous positions. It is the pattern-memory counterpart to digit span, and the two capacities are only loosely related. More spatial games to try next: Tangram Builder and Reflection Builder. Every game in this family is on the spatial reasoning games page.
Remembering which cells of a grid lit up is a pattern-span task. Neuropsychologists separate this kind of visual memory — remembering a static pattern — from spatial sequence memory, where order matters, because the two can be impaired independently.
Visual working memory capacity is small: the classic 1997 experiments by Luck and Vogel found people hold about four objects' worth of visual information at once. Seeing a pattern as a shape — an L, a diagonal, a cluster — lets you exceed that by treating several tiles as one chunk.
Look for shapes — lines, squares, diagonals. Shapes compress the pattern enormously.
Use the grid coordinates. 'Row two, columns one and four' survives better than a visual impression.
Count the lit cells so you know when to stop clicking.
Click certain cells first — recalling one often unlocks the one beside it.
Isolated cells run out for most people somewhere around four to six. Shapes push that considerably higher.
No, only the set.
Spatial Path presents a sequence in order. This presents positions simultaneously, which loads a different capacity.
Find the shape. Nobody memorises seven cells; strong scorers memorise two shapes.