Test Your Focus

Maybe it's just me, but this feels like a poorly-constructed test.

My own approach was to simply ignore anything blue; since my browser window is blue-framed, the Times background is black and white, and the UI elements are all blue, I simply blurred my vision and made note of the items that visually jumped out at me. I certainly didn't keep any of the blue items "in memory"; I only noted and remembered the two visually-distinctive ones.

I'm sure there's some kind of science behind this, but I feel like I just participated in a cheap parlor game.

Edit: Just to clarify, I scored 2/2, so this isn't just sour grapes about not getting a good score. ;)

Did anyone else wonder if they were supposed to be looking for the moonwalking bear? http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pTv4yD6BKlA

I think this is a bad test because I lost focus half way through and still scored 100%. The first few were tricky, because you're not yet "wired" to only see the red ones. Then it gets easy, and after 10 or so you get bored. This is when you should be making mistakes.

Unfortunately, humans have extraordinary peripheral vision so even if you do tasks that destroy your concentration (in my case: selecting some tracks on spotify and reading the subject of a "new email bubble") you will still be able to sense whether the red bars rotated.

To really test concentration you should have some kind of continuous stream of information, so that you lose count the moment your mind drifts. That would probably give much better data. Then you can measure the average time before people lose concentration, and so forth.

I had a hard time with the letter/number one, since to me, vowels seem even, while consonants seem odd, while the pairing in the test was the opposite. I kept wanting to click on the wrong side, even though I correctly identified the object.

I did only get one wrong (and knew it the second I clicked), but I think I could have done it faster without the extra mental processing to override my urge to click on the wrong spot.

me = good focus + bad multitasker

http://twitpic.com/1urx6m

It's hard to imagine any group of people that would fair to get a perfect score on this test within some small margin of error.

I only managed a 92% with > 6 blue rectangle = I can do tasks with around 2 distractions. And when the distraction increases to 6, my performance decrease. NEVER MULTITASK from onwards, I figured if I can complete one task at a time, at the end of the day I will be able to complete quite a handful of tasks.