Do two things at once: Track your cursor near the moving red ball while simultaneously answering math questions. 60 seconds. Tests divided attention and cognitive load.
Research shows humans don't truly multi-task — we rapidly switch attention between tasks ("task-switching"), and each switch has a cost. People who believe they are good at multi-tasking are often the worst at it (Ophir et al., 2009). This test measures how well you can divide and switch attention under load.
Also try the Flanker Test and Attention Test for focused attention measures.
Human brains do not truly multitask — we task-switch, rapidly alternating attention between concurrent demands. Each switch carries a cognitive cost: a reset latency of 200–500ms as the prefrontal cortex reconfigures its task set. This switching overhead means that simultaneous dual-task performance is almost always worse than the sum of sequential single-task performance — a phenomenon called the psychological refractory period.
A landmark 2009 study by Ophir, Nass, and Wagner found a surprising result: people who reported heavy media multitasking (phone while watching TV, social media while working) performed worse than light multitaskers on a laboratory multitasking battery. Heavy media multitaskers were more distractible, had less control over working memory, and task-switched less efficiently — despite believing themselves to be better multitaskers. The test you just completed likely reflects this directly.
Air traffic controllers, emergency dispatchers, and orchestra conductors develop exceptional divided attention through years of deliberate practice in their specific dual-task environments. Crucially, this expertise is highly domain-specific: an expert air traffic controller does not show a general divided-attention advantage outside their familiar task format. True general-purpose multitasking superiority is extremely rare.
The most effective way to improve performance on this test is to improve the individual component tasks to automaticity. When the math component becomes automatic enough to require minimal conscious effort, more resources are freed for tracking — and vice versa. This is why Math Speed and Attention practice both feed directly into multitasking performance.