Flanker

Flanker is a pure selective-attention game built on one of the most studied paradigms in cognitive psychology · the Eriksen flanker task. A row of arrows appears, and your only job is to report which way the middle arrow points. The catch: the arrows around it · the flankers · often point somewhere else, and your eyes read the whole row faster than they read the centre.

How a round works. A row of three, five or seven arrows appears. Find the centre arrow (the row is always an odd length, so it is the exact middle) and tap the direction it points · up, down, left or right. When the flock agrees with the centre the round feels effortless; when it disagrees, the surrounding arrows push your answer their way and you have to suppress the impulse.

What it trains. Attentional filtering and response inhibition · reacting to the signal while actively ignoring the noise around it. The flanker effect (slower, more error-prone answers on incongruent rounds) is one of the most replicated findings in attention research, and shrinking it with practice is exactly the skill the game exercises.

It grows with you. Easy rounds show a short row that mostly agrees with the centre. As difficulty rises the flock gets wider, incongruent rounds dominate, and at the top tier every flanker picks its own direction so no quick pattern-read survives.

Part of the PlayMemorize family of brain-training games. Runs entirely in your browser, works offline as a Progressive Web App.