game 9 of 16 · measures focus

Perceptual discrimination task

Inside TELLS it's “The Faces” — small mouth, tap left. Big mouth, tap right. Subtle and fast — stay sharp.

part of the full 16-game test · about 12 minutes

What the Perceptual discrimination task is

Two nearly identical faces; one detail — the mouth — differs by a fraction. Small mouth, tap left; big mouth, tap right; 1.5 seconds each. Perceptual discrimination tasks like this one (the 'Lengths' game in hiring assessments, where it's line lengths) measure fine-grained attention where the differences sit right at the edge of what you can see.

What it measures

Your hit rate on the subtle trials measures sustained attention to detail: anyone catches the obvious ones, but holding calibration for sixteen fast, nearly-identical judgments is a skill. Misses cluster when attention drifts — which is exactly what the game is there to detect.

Scattered

Your attention is a butterfly. Details slip the net.

Steady

You hold the thread until something shinier wanders by.

Locked-in

You hold a long sequence in your head and don't drop it.

Why hiring assessments use it

Detail-discrimination games proxy the unglamorous but expensive skill of catching small differences fast — the typo, the off-by-one, the anomaly in a column of normals.

TELLS is an independent project — not affiliated with pymetrics, Harver, or any employer's assessment. This is the fun version.