Focani

Using Focani in a class

Three things decide whether a browser demo is usable in teaching: what the task descends from, how far this version drifts from the published one, and what happens to a student’s data. Consumer sites rarely answer any of them. All three are answered on this page.

The short version: nothing to install, no account to create, and every test is playable as a guest. Where this version departs from the published procedure, it is written down beneath that test rather than left for you to discover in a lab section.

Running it with a group

  • No account, no install. Everything runs in the browser. Signing in exists only to save scores and appear on the leaderboard; a student who never signs in can still play every test.
  • The free plan allows 5 sessions per test per day — enough for a demonstration, and the cap is counted per browser rather than per person. On a shared lab machine, students after the first few will hit that cap. One device per student avoids it entirely.
  • Timing is browser timing. Display latency, input lag and event-timestamp granularity add tens of milliseconds that vary by machine. The classic effects here are large enough to survive that; individual response times are not precise enough to compare between two students on two devices.

What a student session records

Guests are not given a profile and their results are not written to any account. What is recorded is anonymous usage: which test was started and finished, the difficulty, that round’s score, the page it happened on, and a random session identifier kept in sessionStorage — per tab, and gone when the tab closes. No cookie is set for this, and nothing collected identifies a person.

Results are attached to someone only if that person creates a free account and chooses to save them. There is no bulk enrolment, no roster, and no way for one account to see another’s sessions.

We are not in a position to make a compliance determination for your institution. The point of stating the above precisely is that you can make one. The privacy policy is the authoritative version.

What this is not

Every test here is a practice and self-tracking exercise: not validated, not normed, and it cannot screen for or indicate any condition. Scores are internal to this site and cannot be compared with published figures.

There is no trial-level data export. If you need per-trial output, counterbalancing, or anything you intend to analyze, use a platform built for running studies — PsyToolkit, jsPsych and Inquisit all exist for that and this does not replace them. What this is good for is a demonstration a class can run in two minutes without an account.

Where each task comes from

Sizes below are read from the live configuration, so they cannot quietly fall out of date. Where a paradigm has no single canonical source, that is said rather than papered over with a citation that would not hold up.

Schulte Table~2 min

Source
No single published source.
The paradigm
Attributed to Walter Schulte, a German psychiatrist, in the 1950s. It is the one item here with no canonical published procedure in English — grid size, layout and scoring differ between sources, and it appears far more in Russian-language attention research than in Anglophone journals.
Published version
No reference procedure exists. A 5×5 grid is the most widely circulated form.
This version
5×5 — 25 cells · 7×7 — 49 cells, Pro · 10×10 — 100 cells, Pro
What that changes
With no reference version there is nothing to deviate from — and equally nothing to compare a result against. It is a scanning exercise, not an instrument.

Stroop Test~2 min

Source
Stroop, J. R. (1935). Studies of interference in serial verbal reactions. Journal of Experimental Psychology, 18(6), 643–662.
The paradigm
The original used printed cards read aloud and timed as a whole list. The trial-by-trial keyed version taught today came later.
Published version
Card administration times a full list; computerized versions run from dozens to several hundred trials.
This version
Standard — 16 trials · Fast — 24 trials, Pro · Adaptive — 40 trials
What that changes
Answers are four keys rather than speech, so what is measured is manual interference, not vocal. The interference effect itself survives that change; the absolute times do not transfer.

Multiple Object Tracking~1 min

Source
Pylyshyn, Z. W., & Storm, R. W. (1988). Tracking multiple independent targets: Evidence for a parallel tracking mechanism. Spatial Vision, 3(3), 179–197.
The paradigm
Several identical items move among identical distractors; a subset was cued at the start and has to be held through the motion.
Published version
Set size and speed are varied to estimate a tracking capacity, typically found at around four items.
This version
3 targets — 5 rounds · 4 targets — 5 rounds, Pro · 5 targets — 5 rounds, Pro · Adaptive — 14 rounds
What that changes
The fixed difficulties report how you did at a set size you picked, which is not a capacity estimate. The adaptive difficulty does converge on a threshold, but by our own staircase rather than any published procedure.

Simon Effect Test~1 min

Source
Simon, J. R., & Rudell, A. P. (1967). Auditory S-R compatibility: The effect of an irrelevant cue on information processing. Journal of Applied Psychology, 51(3), 300–304.
The paradigm
The original was auditory — a spoken word arriving in one ear while the ear it arrived in was irrelevant. The visual left/right version is the one now taught.
Published version
Compatible and incompatible trials are balanced across a few hundred trials so the compatibility effect can be estimated per participant.
This version
Standard — 20 trials · Extended — 32 trials, Pro · Adaptive — 40 trials
What that changes
Visual rather than auditory, and far fewer trials per condition. The direction of the effect is reliable at this length; its size in any one session is not.

Flanker Test~1 min

Source
Eriksen, B. A., & Eriksen, C. W. (1974). Effects of noise letters upon the identification of a target letter in a nonsearch task. Perception & Psychophysics, 16(1), 143–149.
The paradigm
A central target flanked by items that call for the same response, the opposite one, or neither. Response competition from the flankers slows the answer.
Published version
Letters as flankers, with trial counts running into the hundreds so each congruency condition gets enough trials.
This version
Standard — 24 trials · Extended — 40 trials, Pro · Adaptive — 40 trials
What that changes
Arrows rather than letters, and a fraction of the trials per condition. A single session's congruency effect is noisy — usually in the right direction, not stable in magnitude.

Go/No-Go Task~1 min

Source
No single published source.
The paradigm
No single origin paper. The procedure descends from Donders's (1868) subtractive method and has been independently reinvented across the developmental, addiction and clinical literatures, with the ratio of go to no-go trials and the stimuli differing in each.
Published version
Varies widely by literature. Go trials outnumber no-go trials so that responding becomes the prepotent habit that has to be withheld.
This version
Standard — 48 trials · Extended — 72 trials, Pro
What that changes
The parameters here are ours, because there is no reference version to match. That makes the demonstration valid and the number meaningless outside this site.

Sustained Attention to Response Task~2 min

Source
Robertson, I. H., Manly, T., Andrade, J., Baddeley, B. T., & Yiend, J. (1997). “Oops!”: Performance correlates of everyday attentional failures in traumatic brain injured and normal subjects. Neuropsychologia, 35(6), 747–758.
The paradigm
Digits appear in sequence and every one is answered except a single designated digit. Pressing on that digit is read as a lapse of sustained attention rather than a mistake.
Published version
225 trials at a 1,150 ms stimulus-onset asynchrony — roughly four and a half minutes.
This version
Standard — 75 trials · Extended — 150 trials, Pro
What that changes
Shorter and, deliberately, slower. Both changes work against the state the task exists to elicit, so commission errors here run lower than published figures for the same person.

Mackworth Clock Test~2 min

Source
Mackworth, N. H. (1948). The breakdown of vigilance during prolonged visual search. Quarterly Journal of Experimental Psychology, 1(1), 6–21.
The paradigm
A pointer steps round a blank dial once per second and occasionally skips a step. The finding was that detection falls off sharply within the first half hour.
Published version
Two hours, with the decrement appearing in the first 30 minutes.
This version
Standard — 120 ticks · Extended — 240 ticks, Pro
What that changes
Two to four minutes. The vigilance decrement — the entire reason the original exists — has no time to appear, so this shows the task without showing the finding.

Psychomotor Vigilance Task~3 min

Source
Dinges, D. F., & Powell, J. W. (1985). Microcomputer analyses of performance on a portable, simple visual RT task during sustained operations. Behavior Research Methods, Instruments, & Computers, 17(6), 652–655. Brief version: Basner, M., Mollicone, D., & Dinges, D. F. (2011). Validity and sensitivity of a brief psychomotor vigilance test (PVT-B) to total and partial sleep deprivation. Acta Astronautica, 69(11–12), 949–959.
The paradigm
A counter starts at an unpredictable moment and you stop it. Responses slower than a fixed threshold are counted as lapses, and the lapse count is the primary measure — it is far more sensitive to sleep loss than the average response time is.
Published version
Ten minutes with a 2–10 s interval between stimuli and a 500 ms lapse threshold. The published brief version — tested against total and partial sleep deprivation in its own right — runs three minutes with a 1–4 s interval and a 355 ms threshold.
This version
3 min — 180 seconds · 6 min — 360 seconds, Pro
What that changes
The three-minute tier follows the published brief version's parameters; the six-minute tier is ours and matches nothing published. Neither is administered under the controlled conditions the sleep-deprivation findings come from.

Cancellation Task~2 min

Source
Gauthier, L., Dehaut, F., & Joanette, Y. (1989). The Bells Test: A quantitative and qualitative test for visual neglect. International Journal of Clinical Neuropsychology, 11(2), 49–54.
The paradigm
A family rather than one task: letter, symbol and shape cancellation sheets have been used in neuropsychology since the mid-twentieth century, most prominently to detect visual neglect. The citation is one well-known member of that family.
Published version
A fixed printed sheet, scored on omissions and — critically — on where on the page those omissions fall.
This version
Letters — 16 targets · Dense — 26 targets, Pro
What that changes
A screen with a randomized layout, scored on speed and completeness rather than the spatial distribution of misses. The spatial part is exactly what the clinical versions are for, so this cannot indicate neglect.

Trail Making Test~1 min

Source
Army Individual Test Battery (1944); brought into wide use by Reitan, R. M. (1958). Validity of the Trail Making Test as an indicator of organic brain damage. Perceptual and Motor Skills, 8, 271–276.
The paradigm
Part A connects a numeric sequence; Part B alternates numbers and letters. The difference between the two parts is the quantity of interest, not either time alone.
Published version
Pencil on paper with an examiner present who corrects each error as it happens. Age- and education-stratified norms exist and are the reason clinicians use it.
This version
Part A — 15 targets · Part B — 16 targets, Pro
What that changes
Pointer or touch instead of pencil, no examiner, and fewer targets than the standard 25 per part. Those norms do not apply to this version.

Change Blindness Test~2 min

Source
Rensink, R. A., O'Regan, J. K., & Clark, J. J. (1997). To see or not to see: The need for attention to perceive changes in scenes. Psychological Science, 8(5), 368–373.
The paradigm
The flicker paradigm. Two versions of a scene alternate with a blank between them, and the blank removes the motion transient that would otherwise make the change jump out.
Published version
Photographs of real scenes, with the number of alternations needed to spot the change as the measure.
This version
Basic — 4 scenes · Dense — 5 scenes, Pro
What that changes
Generated displays rather than photographs. The demonstration works — the effect is robust — but difficulty is not comparable to the published scenes.

Task Switching Test~3 min

Source
Meiran, N. (1996). Reconfiguration of processing mode prior to task performing. Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory, and Cognition, 22(6), 1423–1442.
The paradigm
The explicitly cued version, in which a cue on each trial announces which rule applies. Jersild (1927) ran the first version of the procedure; the alternating-runs design is Rogers and Monsell (1995).
Published version
The interval between cue and stimulus is manipulated systematically, because the switch cost shrinks as preparation time grows.
This version
Standard — 108 trials · Extended — 168 trials, Pro
What that changes
The preparation interval is fixed, so this yields a switch cost at one interval rather than the preparation function the paradigm was designed to trace.

Linking and corrections

Link to any page here freely — no permission needed and no attribution required. Each test has a stable URL of the form /tools/<task>, and every heading above is anchored, so you can point at one task rather than the whole list.

If a citation above is wrong or a description misstates what a paradigm measures, tell us and it will be fixed. That matters more here than anywhere else on the site. Send a correction.