Everyday Attention Test

Eighteen questions about ordinary moments — the reason you got up and crossed the room, the message that could have waited — answered at your own pace, with nothing to look at and nothing to get right. This is a self-report test about everyday attention, not the classic timed exercise the name comes from, and it takes about six minutes. At the end you get your place on the attention scale and a plain read on how easily your focus gets knocked off course.

You cross a room, or move on to the next step of something, in order to do one specific thing. Does that thing still hold when you get there? I reach the shelf and then stand in front of it with nothing, and the errand has to be rebuilt from the chair I left behind. To get the errand back I usually have to walk the last two rooms again in my head, doorway by doorway. Two or three times a day I end up standing in a doorway, waiting for the reason to catch up with me. When an errand does go missing on the way, it stands out as an odd thing rather than as a Tuesday. The thing I stood up for — the charger, the folded note, whichever it was — is the thing my hand goes to when I get there.

Some mistakes come from not knowing how. Others come from your attention stepping out for a second in the middle of a job. How do the second kind sit in your ordinary week? I put the milk in the cupboard and the cereal in the fridge often enough that nobody at home comments on it anymore. Even on a slow morning something comes out crooked — the message lands in the wrong chat, the form gets yesterday’s date. There is a running list on my desk of things to put right — a wrong field filled in, a step done into the wrong bowl. My week turns up one of these at most: a shirt buttoned one hole out, and a minute spent putting it right. Someone would have to remind me when a routine thing last came out wrong on me for that reason.

There is noise or movement going on around you while you work. What happens to the work itself? The sentence I was building disappears the moment a conversation starts up within earshot, and it does not come back until the room is quiet. Nothing much gets finished in a shared room, so I move to a corner, or I move the work to the evening. The job still reaches the end with a grinder going next door; it just comes out rougher, and the last part is worth doing again in the quiet. I have to sit through the first minute of it, and after that the job carries on to the end without the noise coming up again. People say things like “how are you working through this” and I genuinely have to stop and listen for what they mean.

You finish one job and go straight on to the next. How much of the old one is still running while you do it? At my desk on the second job I am still writing the reply to the first one, line by line, long past the point where it helps. If two jobs come back to back, what I say in the second one keeps being aimed at somebody from the first. For the first twenty minutes something from before is still finishing its sentence over the top of what I am doing now, and then it stops. There is a short tail on the changeover, a stray line or two from before, and then the new thing has all of me. Two minutes into the next job, I could not tell you what the last one was about without going back to look.

Partway through a thought — explaining something, or working through a task — the line of it cuts out on you. What is that like? Halfway through a long explanation, the end of it is already sitting there waiting for me. Whatever knocks the thread loose, it is back before the person across from me notices a gap. Some explanations come out whole; others stop dead at the comma while I stand there rebuilding the point. What goes missing is the second half of what I meant, and hauling it back is real work to do in the middle of a conversation. It takes three run-ups to land one idea, and that is true of most conversations and most jobs I start.

You surface partway through something routine and realize none of it was actually attended to. How familiar is that? Coming to at the end of a chore with no memory of doing it is how most chores finish for me. Somebody asks whether I locked up behind me, and I have to walk back and check. One pass through the dishes I am fully present for; the next happens behind me while I argue with somebody not in the room. It is stranger for me to surface halfway through a job than to have the whole of it available afterwards. The folding and the walk to the corner store both come back to me later with everything in them still attached.

Something asks for your attention in the middle of a task, and it could perfectly well wait. Does it wait? Reaching for the phone before a piece of work is finished is not a move I make; it lies face down until the thing is done. My hand starts toward it now and then, stops on the way, and the work carries on. Whatever I send back in that moment is three words long, because most of me is still in the job. I end up answering first and returning to the paragraph after, and the paragraph is the one that waits. The moment a screen lights up, whatever is on it gets handled before the work does.

Something else suddenly matters more than what you are doing right now. How does your attention take the change? Even when the new thing is obviously the more important one, I spend the first stretch of it still half inside the job I was told to drop. There is a stubborn gap after the switch where I am doing the new job with none of my attention actually on it. Switching needs a walk to the kettle and back before any of my attention arrives at the new job. The change registers straight away and my hands follow it, so the only cost is a minute of tidying up where I stopped. What was urgent stops being interesting the moment something else takes its place, and I am in the new job immediately.

You put an everyday object down somewhere, and later you need it. What usually happens next? The place where the keys landed is never information I have, and the search starts from zero every single time. “Have you seen my glasses” is a line the people around me could recite by now. Somewhere between the kettle and the desk the mug stops being accounted for, and it turns up in the bathroom a minute later. When I go looking, I go straight to one particular surface, and the thing is usually sitting on it. Asked where the scissors are, I answer from the next room without getting up, and I am right.

Do you go back and repeat small steps of a job — not because they were done wrong, but because you were not actually tracking them while they happened? By the time I move on, the step behind me is one I actually watched happen, so there is nothing to go back for. If I do go back over something, it is because the job changed, not because I lost the thread of it. I count the shelf, lose the count somewhere in the middle, and start again from the end I can still see. To be sure a step actually happened I run it again, and a job with three steps in it takes me five. Nothing in a routine job stays done the first time, and I am back over the same step almost every round.

The work in front of you is dull and the same thing over and over, with nothing outside pulling at you. How long does your concentration stay with it? I am gone by the fourth row of a spreadsheet, and the rest of it gets done by my hands alone. Somewhere near the top of the second page my attention has already found something better to think about. Getting through a flat stack means buying my attention back sheet by sheet, and the tiredness afterwards outsizes the pile. There is a soft patch near the end where my attention starts to slide, and the rest of the stretch holds fine. Nothing changes for me between the first item and the hundredth; the attention I bring is the same at both ends.

A small detail has stopped mattering, and it is time to move on. How easily does your attention let go of it? Somebody has to move me on from a detail, because left alone I will keep turning it over long past its usefulness. Even after the decision is made, one small wording or one crooked number keeps coming back to me through the rest of the day. By mid-afternoon a shelf I hung slightly wrong has finally let go of me, hours after anybody else stopped noticing it. I let a detail go on the second pass, and only a stubborn one now and then survives that. Once the question is closed I stop thinking about it, and the next thing gets the whole of me.

The route is one you have taken a hundred times, and the thing you need to notice on it is not new. Does it reach you as you go past? By the time I come back to myself I am two streets past the turn, and that is the standard version of the trip. The stop I need slides by the window while I am somewhere else entirely, and I walk back more often than I would like. I catch the junction a stride late and swing wide into it, close enough that nobody in the car says anything. To miss a turn I know, something fairly unusual has to be going on, and afterwards I can usually name what it was. Whichever way I come at it, the junction announces itself and I am already slowing down for it.

Your attention has drifted off a task, and something outside you is what brings it back. How much of your day does that describe? I end up back in the task under my own steam, before anybody has noticed I left it. The nudge from outside is a rare thing, and the return is usually mine and happens quietly. In a long meeting it is often a question aimed at me that puts me back in the room, and elsewhere I manage the return myself. My name gets said twice before I am in the conversation; my own noticing arrives afterwards, if it arrives at all. Every time attention goes, it is something outside me that ends the trip — a repeated question, a hand waved across the table.

Something you would much rather be doing is available right now, and the task in front of you is not finished. What does your attention do? The better thing — a conversation nearby, an open tab, whatever it happens to be — has me before I have decided anything. Whichever thing it is, it has won inside five minutes, so I put it out of sight before starting anything that matters. “One more page and then I will go” gets me exactly the one page, and then I go. The pull is real, but the job in front of me is heavier, and it usually keeps me until a natural stopping point. If something better is waiting, it is still waiting when I finish, and I get to it then.

An interruption you could not avoid takes you out of what you were thinking. What is getting back in like? It takes one glance at where I stopped, and I am back in the middle of the thought where I left it. One or two sentences of rereading and the shape of it comes back whole, with the next move already in it. The shape of the thought comes back and the wording does not, so I finish it somewhere other than where it was heading. I have to rebuild the thing from its beginning most times, because the middle of it does not survive the break. Back at the desk afterwards there is a long, deliberate climb before any of it makes sense again, and it goes that way nearly every time.

You sit down to read something ordinary. How much of it actually arrives? When I reach the bottom of a page I have almost always taken nothing off it, and the page starts again. Anyone asking me what I just read would get a long pause and a guess. It takes one paragraph for me to know which kind of reading this is: the kind that lands, or the kind I will be doing twice. A few lines here and there I end up reading twice, usually the ones where the argument doubles back. The words go in the first time, and a page I have read is a page I could tell you about.

Sometimes a moment of attention checking out costs nothing at all. Sometimes the thing missed actually mattered. Which describes your ordinary week? If a lapse lands anywhere, it lands on the thing that had weight — the promise made an hour earlier, the one instruction that carried something. The expensive ones all start the same way, with a few seconds where nobody was home. Most of what I miss I pay for myself: a form filled in twice, a bus taken again in the other direction. Missing something with real weight behind it is an event I could still name months afterwards. What slips by me is the harmless kind; the thing that mattered has a way of staying in view even when I have drifted.

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Frequently asked questions

What does the Stroop test measure?

The original exercise sets two things against each other: reading, which is so practiced it runs by itself, and naming a color, which has to be done on purpose. What gets read out of that conflict is selective attention and control. None of that happens on this page: nothing here can be held in front of you for a measured instant, and nothing here has a right answer sitting behind it. What it asks about is your own attention in ordinary life — how often it slips and what those slips cost you, and how it behaves when something is competing for it or asking it to move.

Is this the real Stroop test, and is it timed?

No, and no. It is a short questionnaire you answer at whatever pace suits you: nothing appears on a clock, nothing has a right answer waiting behind it, and there is nothing to look at and react to. It covers the same broad ground the original exercise probes — attention working against something automatic — by a different route, and an honest one for a web page.

Why is the Stroop effect so hard to resist?

Because reading stops being optional once you are good at it. A familiar word turns into meaning before you have decided anything about it, and that finished answer is already sitting there while you are still assembling the one the task actually asked for. The friction between something automatic and something deliberate is the whole effect. It is also the friction the questions on this page ask about, only in kitchens and meetings rather than in a single trial.

What is a good Stroop score?

Nothing of that kind comes out of this page. No figure in fractions of a second, no percentile: those belong to the lab exercise, and the lab exercise is not what you just finished. What comes out instead is where your own account of your attention falls along a continuum — a continuum with no line drawn across it, and with the bulk of people gathered nowhere near either end.

Can the Stroop test diagnose ADHD or dementia?

No. The genuine version, given by a clinician with the right equipment, is sometimes one piece of evidence a specialist weighs alongside many others, and never the whole judgment on its own. This page sits further away still: it is a questionnaire about your own experience, it screens for nothing, and no result on it is evidence about any condition. If that is the question you actually have, a qualified clinician is the person to take it to.

Methodology

This test follows the way everyday attention is studied when the subject is ordinary life rather than laboratory work: you describe your experience, and the answers add into one continuum.

It is not the timed exercise the name comes from, for two reasons. First, plain machinery. A web page cannot hold something in front of you for a measured instant, cannot start a clock on your answer, and has no key to mark that answer against, so the color-naming exercise has no way to exist here. The second would still apply if the machinery existed. Run properly, with equipment, the classic effect is dependable once a group is averaged and weak at separating one person from another: people differ so little on it that almost nothing is left to rank them by. Answering for yourself is the honest road here, not a way around something anybody could have fixed.

What it reads is how often ordinary attention slips, what those slips cost, and whether focus survives a distraction or moves when it must. What it never does is time you, mark you right or wrong, hand out an interference figure or a percentile, or screen for any condition. Losing the thread happens to everybody; what comes back is a place on a continuum, not a symptom count.

On the effect itself, the APA’s plain-language entry on the Stroop effect covers it in a paragraph, and the APA’s fuller account of it goes into its history and its uses.

References

Cheyne, J. A., Carriere, J. S. A., & Smilek, D. (2006). Absent-mindedness: Lapses of conscious awareness and everyday cognitive failures. Consciousness and Cognition, 15(3), 578–592. doi:10.1016/j.concog.2005.11.009.
Derryberry, D., & Reed, M. A. (2002). Anxiety-related attentional biases and their regulation by attentional control. Journal of Abnormal Psychology, 111(2), 225–236. doi:10.1037/0021-843X.111.2.225.
Broadbent, D. E., Cooper, P. F., FitzGerald, P., & Parkes, K. R. (1982). The Cognitive Failures Questionnaire (CFQ) and its correlates. British Journal of Clinical Psychology, 21(1), 1–16. doi:10.1111/j.2044-8260.1982.tb01421.x.
Stroop, J. R. (1935). Studies of interference in serial verbal reactions. Journal of Experimental Psychology, 18(6), 643–662. doi:10.1037/h0054651.

Author: Lex Tarrel, Personality Typologist Reviewed by: Igor Lyadskiy, PhD