Word Memory Test — Free Continuous Recognition Task (Seen vs New)

This word memory test measures verbal recognition memory: how reliably you can tell words you have just encountered from words you have not. Words appear one at a time; you choose Seen if the word came up earlier and New if it is the first time. About half of the words are repeats, and the gap before a repeat ranges anywhere from 2 to 50 words.

The format follows the continuous recognition paradigm from experimental psychology. Rather than counting how many items you memorized, it looks at how dependably you can judge a memory trace. That makes it one of the closest lab analogues to everyday memory, such as recognizing a name, something you read or a detail from a conversation.

You begin with 3 lives, lose one per mistake, and the test ends when none remain. The headline score is the number of words you got through; reaching 60 or more earns a note that your recognition memory is very stable. The result also shows your hit rate (repeats correctly called Seen), false-alarm rate (new words wrongly called Seen) and discrimination, the difference between the two.

Discrimination of 60 percentage points or more reads as very sharp, 35 or more as stable, 15 or more as somewhat confused, and below that as close to guessing. Choosing Seen on 60% or more of trials is flagged as a lenient response bias and 40% or less as strict. Accuracy is also broken down by repetition lag (2–5, 6–10, 11–20 and 21+ words) so you can see how memory fades with distance.

Because the stimuli are words, your native language and vocabulary familiarity matter a great deal. Switching the test language changes the word list, so scores across languages are not comparable. Sleep loss and fatigue tend to show up as more false alarms, and doing the test while distracted usually costs you the long-lag words first.

Repeating the test in the same language a few weeks apart lets you follow trends in discrimination and lag-by-lag accuracy. Keep in mind that the word pool is fixed, so very frequent repeats can inflate scores as the words themselves become familiar. If discrimination stays below 15 points even when you feel well, or you often forget things you just heard in daily life, consider a professional memory assessment. This is a reference tool, not a diagnostic one.