NATURE OF EXERCISE:
This exercise has been designed to improve your ability to store information in short-term memory.

RELEVANCE TO EVERYDAY LIFE:
Short-term memory is one of the most critical cognitive domains with respect to everyday function. Many people think the only purpose of short-term memory is to enable you to accomplish trivial tasks such as remembering a phone number between the time you hear it on the radio and when you dial it seconds later. But short-term memory is much more than that - it's fundamental to your ability to reason and to make judgments that rely on both new information and content held in long-term memory. When such content is needed, it's retrieved from long-term memory and temporarily stored in short-term memory, where it can be manipulated as necessary. Strengthening your short-term memory will enable you to hold and manipulate more information, which should result in improved decision-making and problem solving.

INSTRUCTIONS:
A set of 4 words (called "cues") will be displayed for you to memorize. Then 10 additional words (called "probes") will be presented one at a time. If the probe matches one of the cues from this set, press the RIGHT ARROW key on your keyboard. If it does not match, press the LEFT ARROW key on your keyboard. There will be a total of 4 sets in this exercise. If you achieve 80% or greater accuracy in a set, the number of cues contained in the next set will increase by one. If you fail to achieve 80% accuracy, the number of cues contained in the next set will decrease by one. The minimum number of cues per set is 4. The maximum is 8.

Please note that Reaction Time plays only a minimal role in the scoring of this exercise. Runs with higher memory levels will always have higher scores than runs with lower memory levels. Reaction Time will only serve as a tiebreaker in runs with identical memory levels.