Experiment: Time-pressured learning + recall — looking for feedback from cognitive testing folks

Discussion

I’ve been experimenting with a small web-based cognitive task and wanted some input from people here who think more rigorously about cognition and testing.

The idea is a 3-minute session with two phases:

  1. Rapid learning phase — you’re shown a compact set of factual information.
  2. Recall + application phase — you answer under time pressure, with scoring based on both accuracy and speed.

What I’m trying to probe (very informally for now):

  • How people perform when learning and retrieval are tightly coupled.
  • Whether time pressure meaningfully changes recall strategies.
  • Whether this feels closer to memory, processing speed, or something else entirely.

It’s obviously not a validated test and not meant as an IQ measure — more of a cognitive task / prototype. I’m mainly interested in qualitative feedback from people who are familiar with cognitive testing:

  • What cognitive abilities do you think this is actually tapping?
  • Does the design introduce obvious confounds?
  • How would you even begin to formalize something like this?

If anyone is curious to try it, I can share the link in comments or DMs (don’t want to spam the post itself). I’m just looking for a small number of serious testers and critiques.

Posted Jan 30, 2026, 5:07 AM UTC

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