Memory Matching Game for Adults

The matching game, grown up

Everyone has played it: cards face down, turn two over, keep them if they match. It goes by many names — Concentration, Pairs, Pelmanism, Match Up — and it is usually a kids’ game with cartoon animals. The version above, called Mind Flip in Memo, is built for adults in two ways:

• A 2.5-second preview. Every card is shown face up before the round starts. Most of the game is won or lost in those seconds — it rewards taking in a whole layout at a glance.
• Abstract patterns instead of pictures. A dog and a cat are easy to name and therefore easy to remember. Geometric patterns are harder to label, so you have to actually hold the image.

Where the memory matching game comes from

In Britain the game is still called Pelmanism, after Christopher Louis Pelman, who founded the Pelman Institute “for the Scientific Development of Mind, Memory and Personality” in London at the end of the 1890s. Pelmanism was a mail-order course in mental training, and it looked a lot like today’s brain-training apps. As a University of Michigan researcher describes it, members got booklets with titles like “Concentration,” mailed in exercise sheets for review, and practiced short games — one of them was finding matching pairs among playing cards laid face down. The course peaked shortly after World War I; the card game outlived it.

In the US the game is better known as Concentration, which was also the name of a long-running TV show. NBC’s Concentration debuted on August 25, 1958, with Hugh Downs as host until 1969, and built a quiz around matching pairs hidden on a big board. The daytime show ran until 1973. In Japan the card game is called shinkei-suijaku.

How to play

1. Deal the cards: 12 cards, 6 pairs. All are face up for 2.5 seconds.
2. They flip. Tap a card, then another.
3. A match stays face up. A miss turns back over after a moment.
4. Find all six pairs. Your score is the number of flips (each pair of cards turned is one flip).

Six flips is a perfect game: every pair found first time. Memo saves your best flip count each day and uses time as the tiebreaker.

What it trains

Matching games lean on visual working memory — holding what you saw and where — and on spatial memory, remembering locations on a grid. Each miss also adds information you need to keep: after a few turns you are juggling the positions of several half-known cards at once.

Strategies for fewer flips

• Scan in pairs during the preview. Don’t try to memorize twelve cards. Look for matches and note “top-left goes with bottom-right.” Two or three remembered pairs is a strong start.
• Give patterns names. “Target,” “stripes,” “checkers.” A word is easier to hold than a shape, and saying it silently helps it stick.
• Open a known card first. If you remember where one half of a pair is, turn that one second, not first — flip an unknown card, and if it matches something you have seen, go and get it.
• Work row by row. When you have to explore, do it systematically so you never forget which cards you have already seen.
• Don’t guess twice. A random second card wastes a flip. If you don’t know the match, use your second card to reveal something new.

Does it improve your brain? What the research says

Pelman sold card matching as mind training more than a century ago. Researchers have since tested both the game itself and the bigger promise behind it.

• Kids don’t actually beat adults. It is a popular belief that young children are experts at this game. In a 1996 controlled study of 80 children aged 5 to 10 and 32 adults, the adults won overall, and the 5- to 10-year-olds scored about the same as each other. One surprise: the 5-year-olds made the fewest spatial errors, even though the older players gathered information more efficiently.
• You improve at what you practice. In a six-week online study with 11,430 adults, people who practiced memory, attention and reasoning games got much better at every one of them. On untrained tests, though, their gains were small at best and similar to a control group that did no brain games.
• Some spill-over to similar tasks. A 2016 meta-analysis of working memory training (87 publications, 145 comparisons) found reliable short-term gains on other verbal and visuospatial working memory tests, but no convincing improvement in reasoning, reading or arithmetic.
• Everyday life is the hard part. A 2016 review of brain-training studies found extensive evidence for gains on trained tasks and little evidence that training improves everyday cognitive performance.

Is a memory matching game good for adults?

It is a good short focus exercise and a satisfying one: you can feel yourself improving within a few rounds. What the research does not support is the bigger claim that playing it improves memory across the board. People get better at the games they practice; spill-over into everyday memory is small at best. Play it because it is enjoyable and a good two-minute reset — and if you want more variety, the Chimp Test and the word recall test work other kinds of memory.