The rule of a flanker task is deliberately narrow: respond to the item in the centre and ignore the items beside it.
The surrounding items sometimes agree with the required response. Sometimes they conflict. The target stays in the same place and the rule does not change.
Try two rows now
For each row, report only the direction of the middle arrow.
Row A: ← ← ← ← ←
Row B: → → ← → →
The correct answer to both rows is left.
In Row A, the surrounding arrows point the same way as the centre. This is a congruent trial.
In Row B, the surrounding arrows point right while the centre points left. This is an incongruent trial. The flankers suggest the competing response, but they are irrelevant to the rule.
If Row B felt more awkward, you have experienced the structure the task is designed to create. That personal impression is not a measurement by itself: timing, error recording and a controlled protocol would be needed to compare conditions properly.
A four-step way to answer
- Find the centre. Do not begin by reading the row from the left.
- Name the target direction. Say “left” or “right” before considering the rest.
- Respond to that direction. The flankers never change the rule.
- Reset your gaze. Find the centre again on the next trial.
This routine is intentionally less dramatic than “block out every distraction.” You can still see the surrounding symbols. The task is to keep them from deciding the response.
Congruent does not mean correct
Congruent describes the relationship between the target and flankers, not whether the participant answered correctly.
In → → → → →, all arrows agree. The required response is right.
In ← ← → ← ←, the centre points right while the flankers point left. The required response is still right.
You can answer a congruent trial incorrectly or an incongruent trial correctly. “Congruent” and “incongruent” label stimulus conditions; “correct” and “incorrect” label responses.
The original experiment used letters
The 1974 experiment by Barbara Eriksen and Charles Eriksen did not use the familiar arrow or bird row. It used target letters surrounded by other letters and compared compatible and incompatible response conditions. The researchers reported longer reaction times when the noise letters were associated with a competing response.
Arrow, fish and bird versions are later adaptations of the centre-target plus surrounding-distractor idea. That distinction matters: a friendly animal variant can share a rule without being identical to a published research protocol.
What a quick attempt cannot tell you
A casual flanker round can demonstrate the instructions and the difference between agreeing and conflicting neighbours. It cannot, on its own:
- diagnose ADHD or another condition;
- produce a standardised attention score;
- prove that someone has “good” or “bad” inhibition;
- show that repeated play improves school performance or broad attention.
Those claims require validated measures and appropriate study designs. Even a slower response on one incongruent row may reflect reading direction, unfamiliarity, a stray tap or ordinary variation.
The Stroop task also creates interference, but its competing features are word meaning and ink colour. Try that different rule in the Stroop effect colour-word game. A one-back task is different again: it compares the current item with an earlier one rather than ignoring spatial flankers.
What Focus Flock actually does
Math & Patterns’ current Focus Flock logic gives the centre bird a left or right direction. The surrounding birds face either the same direction or the opposite direction, and the answer is judged only against the centre bird. That is a genuine flanker-style game rule.
Focus Flock is currently an app-only catalogue entry, not a browser task. It is also not presented here as a laboratory-equivalent or diagnostic test. The two arrow rows above are the complete demonstration available on this page.
Sources and further reading
- Eriksen and Eriksen’s original paper, “Effects of noise letters upon the identification of a target letter in a nonsearch task”, describes the letter-based compatible and incompatible conditions.
- A child-focused study in Frontiers in Psychology describes a modified arrow flanker task with congruent and incongruent trials.
