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Comment by tantalor | Hacker News Reader

> watching letters appear on a computer screen every 1.6 seconds and documenting when one matched a letter that had appeared three letters ago. The other 16 participants were asked to perform a similar, but easier task. Both teams worked for just over six hours

This is torture

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Reminds me of a card game I played as a kid called Egyptian Ratscrew, where one of the possible rules is to slap the deck if a "sandwich" appeared (e.g. a 3, a J, then another 3), so you always had to keep the card before the last one in your head. I remember variations such as "double sandwiches"—which made the 2-back into a 3-back—and many others.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Egyptian_Ratscrew

I use to colloquially call this game "slap deck" as a kid. The general approach taken was to add a ton of house rules, such that it was a large test of working memory to keep all rules in your head. We kept some simple rules to keep the game approachable for younger children, and older children/teens would continue to add house rules to make the game more complex. In addition, game play would be very fast, and often times patterns would be missed because no one recognized it quick enough.

Some of the rules that would sometime appear that I can recall

* Put 1 or 2 jokers in. Jokers are slappable

* Doubles are slappable (3, 3)

* Three (or four) face cards are slappable

* Three (or four) cards of the same suite are slappable

* Three (or four) consecutive cards are slappable (2, 3, 4, 5) or (5, 4, 3, 2)

* A player without cards can 'slap in'

I’ve taught this game to 3 year olds and college students - everyone has fun with it!

Ahh, thanks for the memories! If it weren't for my slow reflexes, I would have been much better at that game.

This is a working memory exercise called "n-back". For true torture try "dual n-back" where you also have to match a tone, shape or color.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/N-back

It's like guitar hero's evil twin.

After six hours, I wish the study would've differentiated between "tired" and "murderously enraged"

> This is torture

I would like to ask everyone to stop for a moment and think if in their line of work they are required to perform tasks like this. Your job might be even shittier than you currently feel like it is

The difference is the reward afterward. Learning to play a complex piece on an instrument is mentally taxing, but getting it right gives you that sense of accomplishment that can't really be matched with anything else. Same with debugging a program you are writing, or solving other types of problems.

Doing hours of arithmetic homework as a child didn't give me that reward signal, so for me that was torture back then.

This is fairly similar to an ADHD screening test I took. I was mentally exhausted after about 20 minutes of it.

I took a similar one, I remember "trying" really hard to prove to myself that I wasn't faking but about 30 seconds later I was looking about the room and struggling to recall if the screen changed at all. Was a nice confirmation of my issues.

Probably got a chance to win a $20 Amazon gift card in return

How many minutes could you last before you lost focus said, "Screw it" and stopped really trying? I think I'd last maybe 5 minutes.

ChatGPT throw together that game in a few seconds if you want to play it.

https://github.com/zulln/misc/tree/master/lettergame https://zulln.se/misc/lettergame/

Sounds like something coming straight out of The Stanley Parable.

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