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Flanker task · The Lab

Follow the middle

Play Follow the middle

How to play

Five arrows. Say which way the middle one points and ignore the others. Twenty-four rounds, as fast as you can.

Tap left or right · Or arrow keys

Free in your browser, with ten levels that get harder. No account; your best scores stay on your device.

What the study found

Neighbours you ignore still slow you down.

People identified a target letter more slowly when the letters beside it called for the opposite response, even though they knew exactly where to look. The original used letters; arrows are a common modern version, used in the Attention Network Test (Fan and colleagues, 2002).

Eriksen and Eriksen · Perception & Psychophysics, 1974

Why it matters

The middle arrow never changed; only the arrows around it did. What surrounds people at work shapes what they do too. That is why KOZMO describes what keeps happening in a situation, not what kind of person someone is.

It is for fun: the game does not measure you.

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