Neon Colour
2-Back Task
The n-back is the standard laboratory probe of working-memory updating: you hold the last two colours in mind, and every new colour both has to be compared against them and pushed into their place. It is not a memory-span test — the load never grows. What it measures is how cleanly you can keep rewriting a small amount of information while using it.
The task
The third colour above repeats the first, two places back — that is a match. Watch for near-misses too: a colour that repeats the one immediately before it, or three back, is a lure and pressing on it costs you. Respond as fast as you can while the colour is still up.
Advanced parameters
These are the standard settings, so this run joins your working-memory trend on Progress. Changing the timing or the match and lure rates makes a different task — those runs are still saved and reported, but they are left off the trend rather than compared with runs they don't belong beside.
Time from onset to the next colour. Shorter is harder.
Near-misses at 1 and 3 back — the trials that tell interference control from guessing.
Outcomes only — the colours stay hidden until the report, or the rail would hand you the answer.
Your settings are remembered in this browser. High match frequencies and long sessions are the two knobs that move the score most, so compare runs collected under the same settings. This is a research-style instrument and educational demonstration — not a medical or diagnostic device. A single session is noisy, population overlap is large, and n-back performance improves with practice on the task itself, which is not the same as improved working memory.
Neon Color 2-Back
What this test measures
The n-back is one of the most widely used working-memory tasks in cognitive science. Colors appear one at a time, and your job is to flag each one that matches the color shown two steps earlier. To do that you must hold the last two items in mind and replace the oldest one on every trial — a continuous cycle of storing, updating, and discarding that keeps working memory under constant load.
Performance reflects working-memory updating and sustained focus. It is scored on the balance between hits (real 2-back matches you caught) and false alarms (non-matches you flagged), so neither trigger-happy responding nor extreme caution can inflate the result.
How to use it
A session takes a few minutes. Expect the first few sessions to improve as you find a strategy — the n-back has a practice curve, so treat early scores as calibration and later ones as your baseline. Signed-in sessions are saved, and the Progress page tracks your working-memory composite over time.
Sapiens Bench tasks are educational instruments for self-tracking, not medical or diagnostic devices.