Flock, follow the middle arrow
Five arrows in a row. Answer with the middle one, left or right, and ignore its neighbours, which sometimes point the other way. It is the flanker task of Eriksen and Eriksen, 1974 (Eriksen and Eriksen, 1974).
- Selective attention
- Distraction filtering
Play it live
Follow the middle arrow.
Answer the direction of the middle arrow, left or right, and ignore the others. 20 seconds.
Arrow keys work too
What it asks of you
Flock asks for selective attention, keeping your focus on one thing while what surrounds it pulls the other way. When all five arrows agree it is easy. When the neighbours disagree you slow down, and the game asks you to keep that delay short.
It is the skill of reading one line on a busy page, or hearing one voice in a noisy room.
How to play
- Five arrows appear in a row.
- Look only at the middle one.
- Tap left or right to match it, or use the arrow keys.
- The next row comes after a short blank.
- You have twenty seconds, and your score is your number of right answers.
The research behind it
Barbara and Charles Eriksen showed in 1974 that letters placed around a target slow its identification, even when you know they do not matter (Eriksen and Eriksen, 1974). The flanker task has been a reference of attention research ever since.
Practising a task makes you better at it (Simons et al., 2016). In Flock, that means quicker, steadier answers when the arrows disagree.
On your weekly card
Flock is the game of season 4, in free play from the start of the season.
It joins your Focus stat only if its reliability, measured during the beta, reaches a test retest correlation of 0.60. Until then it never counts on your card.
Questions
Why do the neighbours slow me down?
Your attention takes in the whole row before it narrows on the middle. Conflicting neighbours have to be filtered out, which costs a few milliseconds (Eriksen and Eriksen, 1974).
Is it like the Stroop task?
Same family, conflict between what to answer and what pulls you. Color uses words and inks, Flock uses arrows.
Where is the full test?
The flanker test page has the format in detail.
Sources
- Eriksen B.A., Eriksen C.W. (1974). Effects of noise letters upon the identification of a target letter in a nonsearch task. Perception and Psychophysics 16, 143 to 149. doi.org/10.3758/BF03203267
- Simons D.J., Boot W.R., Charness N. et al. (2016). Do brain training programs work? Psychological Science in the Public Interest 17(3), 103 to 186. doi.org/10.1177/1529100616661983
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