N-Back

A letter flashes. Does it match the one from N turns back? One-back is a warm-up. Three-back breaks people.

Working Memory

Go / No-Go

Green means tap, red means don't. The app makes tapping automatic — then throws you a red. Your finger's already moving.

Impulse Control

Choice RT

Signal appears, you react. No strategy to hide behind — just the raw distance between seeing and doing.

Processing Speed

Task Switch

Odd/even. Then suddenly high/low. Same digits, new question, and your last rule is now working against you.

Mental Flexibility

Stroop

The word says RED, the ink is green. Name the ink. Your brain has read automatically since age six — good luck.

Cognitive Control
Today's Numbers 0 of 15 min today
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N-Back
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Choice RT
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Task Switch
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Stroop
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Best Streak
Nothing measured yet. Pick a mode and get your first number.
N-Back — Working Memory Level 1 (1-back)
A letter flashes every 2 seconds. Decide if it matches the letter N steps back in the sequence.
·
N-BACK
···
B
NOW
→ MATCH ✓
Blue tile = the letter showing right now
Purple tile = marks the N-back position — letter is hidden, recall it from memory
No hints — pure memory recall. Respond with Match or No Match only.
Go / No-Go — Inhibitory Control Level 1
GREEN circleTap as fast as you can
RED circleDo NOT tap

Impulsive taps on red = commission error.
Misses on green = omission error.
Choice RT — Processing Speed Level 1
A color flashes on the LEFT or RIGHT.
Tap the matching side button as fast as possible.

Timing window shrinks as accuracy improves.
Task Switch — Flexibility Level 1
A number appears. You'll be asked either:
 • ODD or EVEN?
 • HIGH (>5) or LOW (≤5)?

The rule switches randomly.
Switch trials cost you time. The gap between those and repeat trials is your switch cost.
Stroop — Cognitive Control Level 1
A color word appears in a colored ink. Tap the ink color — not the word itself.
RED
Word says RED
Ink is GREEN
GREEN ✓
Tap the ink color
Your brain wants to read the word. Your job is to ignore it and name the ink. The delay that creates is the number.
B

Session complete

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Sessions
Avg Accuracy
Avg RT (ms)
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Best Streak
Accuracy Trend — All Modes (last 20 sessions)
Reaction Time Trend — All Modes (last 20 sessions)
April 2026
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Everyone Else Invented
Their Numbers

Match some tiles, get told your brain age is 24. That number came from a marketing meeting. CogiTrain runs the actual instruments cognitive scientists have used for ninety years — unmodified, unwatered-down, and measured to the millisecond. This page shows you exactly what's under the hood, because we're the only ones who can afford to.

Why this is different

Your attention is the one thing you use every waking second and have never once been able to see. You know you're sharper some days than others. You've never known by how much.

Five real tests. Reaction times to the millisecond. A baseline built from your own performance, not a population average dressed up as a score. Nobody has ever handed you this before — not your doctor, not your smartwatch, and definitely not a tile-matching game with a "brain age" generator bolted on.

N-Back Working Memory
The task

A letter appears every couple of seconds. Hit Match when it's the same as the one N steps back. One-back is a warm-up. Three-back breaks people. You're holding a moving window in your head and rewriting it every two seconds while the next letter is already coming.

What it exposes

Exactly how much you can hold and update at once before it falls apart. Most people find their ceiling faster than they expect, and it is lower than they'd like to admit.

The real thing: Kirchner built this in 1958. It has been running in cognitive labs for nearly seventy years and it is still one of the hardest things you can ask a human brain to do on demand. This app runs it straight — no power-ups, no cartoon feedback, no invented score on top.
How to read it

The level you can hold is your number. Anyone can luck into one good round. Sustaining 3-back at 80%+ accuracy is a genuinely elite piece of mental hardware, and the app will tell you the moment you get there.

Go / No-Go Inhibitory Control
The task

Green means tap. Red means don't. Sounds like nothing — until the app stacks the deck with green until tapping is automatic, then throws a red at you. Your finger is already moving. Can you stop it?

What it exposes

The exact moment your speed outruns your control. Tap a red and that's a commission error — an impulse that got through. Miss a green and that's an omission error — attention dropped out. Push one down and the other climbs. The app tracks both separately, which is the only way this number means anything.

The real thing: This is the response-inhibition paradigm used across impulsivity and attention research. It's the same task design — not a game inspired by it.
How to read it

Fast with clean reds is the session worth having. Fast with rising commission errors just means you traded control for speed, and most apps would have congratulated you for it. This one tells you.

Choice RT Processing Speed
The task

Signal appears. You respond. Nothing to memorize, nothing to outthink — just the raw distance between seeing and acting, measured in milliseconds.

What it exposes

The purest read on your current state in the whole app. No strategy to hide behind. And the number that matters most isn't your average — it's your consistency. A rock-steady 400ms and an average of 400ms built from 300s and 600s are two completely different brains on the day. Only one of them is running clean.

The real thing: Studied since Hick (1952) and Hyman (1953), whose work on how response time scales with choice became a foundation of the field. Reaction time also tracks with measures of general cognitive ability — a real relationship, in the r = 0.2 to 0.4 range. We're telling you the actual number instead of turning it into an "IQ estimate," because that's what everyone else does and it's fake.
How to read it

Run this one daily. It's the mode that responds hardest to how you slept and what you did last night, which makes it the sharpest instrument you own for catching your own state.

Task Switch Cognitive Flexibility
The task

Odd or even. Then without warning — high or low. Same digits on screen, completely different question, and the rule you were running two seconds ago is now working against you.

What it exposes

Your switch cost — the precise millisecond penalty your brain pays every time it has to drop one rule and load another. Everyone has one. Almost nobody has ever seen theirs. This app puts a number on the exact thing that happens to you every time you get pulled off a task.

The real thing: Jersild identified switch costs in 1927; Rogers and Monsell built the modern paradigm in 1995. It is one of the most reliably reproduced effects in cognitive psychology, and you're running the genuine article.
How to read it

Your switch cost against your own switch cost. Absolute values shift with task design, so a number from here isn't comparable to a lab paper or another app — but the trend in your data is exact, and it's yours.

Stroop Cognitive Control
The task

The word says RED. The ink is green. Name the ink. Your brain has been reading automatically since you were six years old and it will not stop just because you asked it to. You can feel the collision happen.

What it exposes

Your congruency effect — the millisecond cost of overriding an automatic response. That gap is one of the few places you can directly watch your own cognitive control working, in real time, as a number.

The real thing: J. Ridley Stroop published this in 1935. Ninety years and thousands of replications later it is still one of the most bulletproof findings in all of psychology, and versions of it sit inside the clinical batteries neuropsychologists actually use. That's the task in your pocket right now.
How to read it

Watch the congruency effect, not your overall accuracy. The congruent trials are easy for everybody — they're padding. The gap is the signal.

Why these numbers are real
Nobody else will show you their math

Open any other brain app and try to find out how the score is calculated. You can't, because there's nothing to find. Here's ours, in public.

You're measured against yourself

Every comparison is built from your baseline, at your difficulty level, in that mode. Difficulty scales as you improve, so comparing a hard session against an easy one would be garbage — we handle that. A "brain age" scored off a population average tells you nothing about you.

We refuse to report noise

A pattern needs at least five days on each side before this app will say a word about it, and it has to clear a statistical significance test with a correction applied for testing several things at once. Below that bar you get told exactly how many more days it needs. Every other app would have shown you a chart and let you draw the wrong conclusion.

When there's nothing there, we say so

If your caffeine days and non-caffeine days look identical, this app tells you they look identical. That answer is worth money and nobody else in this category will ever give it to you, because their entire product is telling you something happened.

The line we won't cross: no app can promise to raise your intelligence, and the ones that said otherwise got fined for it. CogiTrain measures. That's a bigger claim than it sounds, because measuring this has never been possible outside a lab — and now it's in your pocket.
What you walk away with
A number for something invisible

"I feel a bit off today" becomes "I'm 94ms off my baseline." That is the entire difference between a vague sense and a fact, and you get it in about three minutes.

Your own personal evidence

Sleep, alcohol, illness, time of day — these move reaction time and attention, and that's well documented. What's never existed is your version of it. Log your days, run your sessions, and the app puts your numbers side by side and shows you what your body actually does. Not a study average. Yours.

A record nobody else is keeping

Weeks of millisecond-precision data on your own cognition, on your phone, that no doctor's visit and no wearable on the market is collecting for you.

Put simply: before this, the only way to get these numbers was to walk into a research lab. Now you take the same tests on the couch, and the results are yours to keep.
Get the most out of it
Same time every day

Time of day moves reaction time on its own, so a session at 9am and one at 11pm aren't comparable. Lock in a slot and your data gets dramatically sharper. Three minutes is enough.

Go deep on one or two modes

Everything is computed per mode and per level, so spreading yourself across all five gives you five shallow datasets instead of one powerful one. Choice RT and Stroop react hardest to your daily state — start there.

Log your days

Six taps before a session. That's the difference between a scoreboard and an instrument, and it's what unlocks the patterns that make this app worth having.

Give it two weeks

Your first sessions are you learning the task, not you. Around day ten the baseline settles and the numbers start telling you things you didn't know. That's when this gets addictive.

Audio
Sound Effects
Feedback sounds for correct / incorrect responses
Haptic Feedback
Vibration on correct / incorrect responses
Daily check-in
Ask about my day
Once a day, before your first session. This is what powers your pattern analysis.
Session
N-Back Trials
Number of trials per N-Back session
Choice RT Trials
Number of trials per Choice RT session
Task Switch Trials
Number of trials per Task Switch session
Difficulty Reset
Data
Removes session history stored on this device only. If you've secured your history to an email (via Restore Purchases), that copy is untouched and can be restored back to this device later.
Cognitive Age
Your Age
Used for the brain-age number in Stats. Read that card before you take it seriously.
Subscription
Already subscribed on another device? Restore your Pro access here — no link to click, we'll email you a code.
Found a bug? Got an idea?
This app is built by one person. Tell me what broke or what it should do next and I will actually read it.
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Support
Questions, refund requests, or anything else — cogitrain@martythecreative.com
About
COGITRAIN
Five cognitive tasks, run the way research labs run them, timed to the millisecond. CogiTrain records working memory, inhibitory control, processing speed, cognitive flexibility and cognitive control. It makes no claim to improve any of them, and neither should anything else you have installed.
Difficulty adapts to your performance so sessions stay comparable to each other. Every comparison this app makes is against your own baseline, at your own level, in that mode.
Version 1.0.14