How to Test Your Short-Term Memory

Short-term memory is passive storage: keeping a handful of items available for roughly fifteen to thirty seconds without rehearsing them. Working memory adds manipulation — reordering, calculating, or comparing while holding the items. Repeating a list back in order is short-term memory. Repeating it backwards is working memory.

Both are distinct from long-term memory, which is what stores information over hours, years and decades. A person can have intact long-term recall of childhood and still struggle to retain a sentence just spoken to them.

Digit span forward. Sequences of increasing length are presented and repeated back in order. Most adults manage around five to nine digits.

Word list recall. A short list is read out and recalled immediately, then often again after a delay. The gap between immediate and delayed recall is informative.

Three-word recall. Widely used in brief clinical screens, where three unrelated words are recalled after a few minutes of distraction.

Visual pattern and sequence tasks. A pattern of highlighted squares or a flashing sequence is reproduced from memory, avoiding the language dependence of word lists.

The Memory Index uses visual, sequence, working and spatial tasks so that a single weakness in one style of material does not distort the overall picture.

Test in a quiet room, on a device with a screen you can see comfortably, when you are reasonably rested. Do not test straight after alcohol, a poor night's sleep, or while interrupted — each of these visibly reduces span.

Compare like with like. A score is most useful against your own earlier score under similar conditions, rather than against a single population average.

Everyday lapses — losing keys, forgetting why you walked into a room, blanking on a name that returns later — are common at every age and are not by themselves a sign of disease.

Signs that are worth raising with a doctor include repeating the same question within a conversation, difficulty following familiar routines, getting lost in familiar places, or changes that other people notice and that are getting worse over months.