Word Recall Test: How Many of 16 Words Can You Remember?

What is a word recall test?

A word recall test is the simplest memory test there is: study a list of words, put it away, and write down as many as you can remember. Psychologists call this free recall, because you can recall the words in any order.

The test above is the one in Memo, where it is simply called Memory: 16 words drawn from four random categories (four animals, four foods, four things in a city…), up to 60 seconds to study them, then you type back everything you remember.

Where the word recall test comes from

Memory research began with lists. In 1885 the German psychologist Hermann Ebbinghaus published Memory: A Contribution to Experimental Psychology, a landmark set of experiments on learning and forgetting, with himself as the only subject. Real words vary too much in how easy they are, so he invented more uniform nonsense syllables and drilled rows of thirteen until he could recite them in order twice in a row. His forgetting curve has held up: in a 2015 replication, one volunteer spent 70 hours learning and relearning lists and got results close to Ebbinghaus’s.

Later researchers went back to real words, and two classic free-recall findings explain a lot about your score. At the University of Connecticut, W. A. Bousfield reported in 1953 that people shown a shuffled list of words from a few categories tend to write them back in category clusters. And in 1962 Bennet Murdock charted recall by position for lists of 10 to 40 words: the first 3 or 4 words and the last 8 were remembered best, with a flat valley in between.

The same idea is used in the clinic. The Rey Auditory Verbal Learning Test, for example, reads out a list of 15 words over several trials. Clinical versions use standard lists and age norms, which is exactly what an online game like this one does not have.

How to play

1. Press start and study the 16 words. You have up to 60 seconds; tap “I’m ready” whenever you are.
2. The words disappear. Type each one you remember and press Enter — order doesn’t matter.
3. Correct words fill in green. When you run out, tap “I’m done” to see what you missed.

How many words should you remember?

There is no single “normal” score for this format, because recall depends on the list length, how long you study, whether the words are related and how long you wait before recalling. A few well-established patterns do hold, though:

• Short-term memory is small. Without a strategy, people hold only a handful of unrelated items at once — George Miller’s famous “seven, plus or minus two” from 1956, which Nelson Cowan later revised to about four chunks.
• Sixty seconds changes that. With time to study, you can rehearse and organize, which is how people get well past seven on a 16-word list.
• First and last words stick best. Recall is highest for the start of a list (the primacy effect) and the end (the recency effect), and lowest in the middle — Murdock’s curve.
• Categories help. Lists that fall into groups are easier to recall, and people naturally recall them in clusters — all the animals, then all the foods.

The useful number is your own: take your typical score over a few days as your baseline.

Five ways to remember more words

• Sort before you memorize. Spot the four categories first, then learn the list as four groups of four. Sixteen items become four.
• Make a picture. Combine words into one absurd image: a penguin eating cake on a bridge. Images are recalled far better than bare words.
• Tell a story. Link the words in order into a short, silly story. The story becomes a path you can walk back along.
• Use a memory palace. Place each word at a spot in a room you know well — the door, the sofa, the window — then walk through the room in your head when you recall.
• Recall by category. When you type, go one category at a time (“which animals were there?”). Each category is a cue that pulls the other words with it.

Does it improve your brain? What the research says

Memory for word lists responds well to training. The catch is that what improves is mostly the strategy, and the gains stay close to the kind of task you practiced.

• A memory palace can more than double your score. In a 2017 study in Neuron, 51 young men with no mnemonic experience were split into three groups: 40 days of 30-minute memory-palace (method of loci) training, a working-memory game (n-back) instead, or no training. The memory-palace group went from about 26 to 62 of 72 words, while the other two groups gained 7 to 11 words. Four months later they still recalled about 22 more words than at the start, and their brain connectivity had shifted toward the pattern seen in 23 top memory athletes.
• Span is not fixed. In a classic 1980 study in Science, one volunteer practiced for more than 230 hours and raised his memory span for digits from 7 to 79. The authors credit a good mnemonic system. Miller’s “seven” is a starting point, not a ceiling.
• Strategy training helps older adults too, modestly. A meta-analysis of 35 studies of healthy older adults found that people taught memory strategies improved by 0.31 standard deviations more than control groups.
• Don’t expect it to spread. A 2016 review of brain-training research found plenty of evidence that people improve on the tasks they train, and little evidence that this improves distantly related tasks or everyday thinking. Getting better at word lists makes you better at word lists.

That is good news for your score here: the memory palace and the other techniques above are the kind of strategies these studies trained, and you can use them from the first round.

For a visual kind of memory, try the Chimp Test or the memory matching game.