Selective Attention Test — Free Online 100-Trial Focus Task

Selective attention is the ability to pick out what matters for your current goal from a flood of stimuli and filter out the rest — the same skill that lets you follow one voice in a noisy cafe. This task is Soundary's own online implementation of conjunction target detection, the method used in Broadbent's filter model and Treisman's feature integration theory.

Four 3D shapes — two colors (orange, azure) crossed with two forms (octahedron, cube) — appear one at a time for one second each. You press Select only for the single target whose color and shape both match, and let the other three pass, even when they share the color or the shape. Across 100 trials the target appears 25 times and non-targets 75 times.

Because neither color nor shape alone gives the answer, you have to bind both features before deciding — and how accurately and quickly that attentional filter works shows up in your hit rate and false alarm rate.

The headline accuracy is hits (targets you selected) plus correct rejections (non-targets you let pass), divided by 100 trials, as a percentage. Hit rate tells you how many of the 25 targets you caught, false alarm rate how many of the 75 non-targets you wrongly pressed, and mean reaction times for correct and incorrect responses are shown in milliseconds.

Interpretation looks at both measures together. A hit rate of 90% or higher with a false alarm rate of 4% or lower is described as strong on both detection and inhibition. A high hit rate alone suggests you catch targets but also react to non-targets; a low false alarm rate alone suggests you are careful but occasionally miss targets. If neither applies, the app suggests practicing holding attention on a single target.

Because you must respond within one second, touch latency and screen refresh rate can shift reaction times by tens of milliseconds, and it is common for scores to rise on the second or third attempt through practice. A trend across repeated measurements on the same device is therefore more trustworthy than any single result.

Selective attention is sensitive to how you feel. Misses tend to rise when you are short on sleep, late at night, or drowsy after a meal, while false alarms tend to rise right after a lot of caffeine. Reaction times also lengthen gradually with age, which is a natural change — so comparing against your own earlier records is more meaningful than comparing with other people.

Soundary saves your results and shows how they changed from your previous test. Repeating every one to two weeks, at a similar time of day and on the same device, makes it easier to separate day-to-day fluctuation from real change. This task is a self-check and does not make any diagnosis.

That said, if you often miss targets or repeatedly react to non-targets even on well-rested days, and mistakes or distractibility are causing difficulty in daily life, consider discussing a formal attention assessment with a psychiatrist or other professional.