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How sharp is your memory?
7 quick tests for short-term memory, working memory, and recall. See your percentile.
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Read this list, then close your eyes for 10 seconds: apple, book, river, candle, mountain. Which word was third?
Answer: river. The middle item is hardest to remember — middle-of-list items suffer from both retroactive and proactive interference (the "serial position effect").
Without writing it down, take 248 and add 173. Then double the answer. What did you get?
Answer: 842. 248 + 173 = 421. 421 × 2 = 842. The challenge is holding the intermediate result while performing the second operation — classic working-memory load.
Most people can hold how many distinct items in working memory at once?
Answer: 4 ± 1 (modern revision). Miller's "7 ± 2" is the famous number, but more recent research (Cowan, 2001) consistently finds the true capacity is closer to 4 ± 1 when chunking is controlled.
A chess grandmaster glances at a mid-game board for 5 seconds and recalls every piece. The same grandmaster shown a random arrangement of the same pieces recalls only 5-6. Why?
Answer: They chunk — they see patterns, not pieces. Chase & Simon's classic finding (1973). Experts don't have bigger working memory — they have richer chunks. A meaningful position is one chunk; the same pieces randomly placed is 16+ chunks, beyond capacity.
Without scrolling back: which of these words was NOT in the list from question 1?
Answer: window. "window" wasn't there. The original list was apple, book, river, candle, mountain. Recognition memory (this kind of test) is much easier than free recall.