A transparent account of the 20-task assessment: what happens in each task, how answers become a result, and what that result can—and cannot—support.
The assessment contains 20 tasks divided equally across four practical categories: visual, sequence, working, and spatial memory. Each category contains five tasks. The tasks become more demanding within their category by increasing the amount of material to remember or the number of competing locations.
Presentation time is controlled by the assessment. Visual patterns and spatial layouts appear for three seconds; four-digit working-memory items appear for four seconds; and sequence items are shown one colour at a time. Answers are not scored by speed.
Recognising a briefly presented pattern in a 4 × 4 grid.
Read the guide →Retaining the identity and order of a series of colours.
Read the guide →Holding a four-digit value long enough to reproduce it accurately.
Read the guide →Remembering which location in a grid contained a target symbol.
Read the guide →These four labels are a practical way to organise this assessment. They should not be read as four completely independent brain systems. Memory processes overlap, and visual attention, familiarity with screens, eyesight, fatigue, and strategy can influence more than one category.
Every correct response contributes one point. The result therefore reflects accuracy across 20 trials, with five trials contributing to each dimension profile. There is no penalty for a wrong answer, no bonus for a fast response, and no hidden weighting between dimensions.
The overall result is translated into a descriptive performance band. Dimension results are used to show relative strengths within the same sitting. These labels are summaries of performance on this task set; they are not age-adjusted clinical norms and should not be interpreted as an IQ score, diagnosis, or estimate of everyday functioning.
“Standardised” here means that the instructions, number of tasks, presentation timings, scoring rules, and difficulty progression are consistent. Some answer choices are shuffled, and four-digit items are generated for the sitting, reducing simple answer-position memorisation.
This version has not undergone a published validation, reliability, or population-norming study. Repeating the assessment can introduce practice effects, so changes between two sittings may reflect familiarity as well as a real change in performance. For a cleaner personal comparison, use the same device in similar conditions and leave substantial time between attempts.
Sleep, stress, interruptions, screen size, input method, eyesight, colour perception, language familiarity, medication, illness, and recent practice can all affect an online result. Because the assessment is completed without supervision, those conditions cannot be controlled in the way they can during a formal evaluation.
The task formats are informed by established experimental traditions, but evidence for a task family does not automatically validate this particular assessment. The sources below explain the relevant constructs and the standards expected of computer-delivered testing.
The Memory Index is a 20-task assessment across visual, sequence, working and spatial memory. It takes about 10 minutes and your score is free.
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