game 14 of 16 · measures focus
Visual search task
Inside TELLS it's “Spot It” — find the one shape that matches — colour and form — before time's up.
part of the full 16-game test · about 12 minutes
What the Visual search task is
A grid of near-misses — right shape wrong colour, right colour wrong shape — and exactly one true match. Find it before the clock runs out. Visual search is one of the most-studied paradigms in attention research: the distractors are chosen so the target doesn't 'pop out', forcing a deliberate scan.
What it measures
Hit rate under time pressure measures how efficiently you search: systematic scanners find the target with time to spare, while gaze-bouncers re-check the same wrong candidates. It feeds the focus axis — the locked-in end of that axis hunts in rows, not in panic.
Your attention is a butterfly. Details slip the net.
You hold the thread until something shinier wanders by.
You hold a long sequence in your head and don't drop it.
Why hiring assessments use it
Search tasks proxy real jobs more directly than almost any other game: triaging a queue, scanning a log, finding the one record that doesn't belong.
TELLS is an independent project — not affiliated with pymetrics, Harver, or any employer's assessment. This is the fun version.
Archetypes this game exposes
The focus axis is load-bearing for these three.
More games that read focus
See what your play says about you
This game is 1 of 16. Play them all and the engine reads you onto 1 of 18 archetypes — free, sharable, no account.
Find my archetype