Gyroscope Benchmarks / Mind
Attention test: how long can you stay locked in?
This test measures whether you keep detecting targets while withholding quick responses to distracting shapes.
Why it matters
Sustained attention is the capacity to keep doing one simple thing well after it stops being interesting. It carries you through the second hour of a drive, the last pages of a contract, and the part of a conversation where someone finally says the thing that mattered. Most of the errors that cost you in a day are not hard problems. They are easy ones you stopped watching.
It fades before you notice. Short sleep, a heavy week, a low-grade cold, or a long run of interruptions all thin it out, and the feeling of being fine outlasts the ability. In one study, two weeks of six-hour nights produced cognitive deficits equal to two full nights without sleep, while people rated themselves only mildly impaired. That gap between how sharp you feel and how sharp you are is the reason to measure it.
Van Dongen et al., Sleep, 2003
Signal Stream gives you one number for it, taken the same way every time: the same stream, the same rule, the same 75 seconds. Once a month, that number shows whether misses and false alarms are drifting upward long before a bad day tells you. A single run is a snapshot. A line of them is one of the few ways to see your attention from the outside, and whether the sleep or stress you already suspect is reaching it.
What this test measures
Signal Stream is a Go/No-Go style task. Shapes arrive in a rapid stream. You tap for the target and do nothing for distractors. Missing a target reflects a lapse in sustained attention, while tapping a distractor is a false alarm that reflects failed response inhibition.
Hit rate, false-alarm rate, and reaction time must be read together. A fast responder can make more impulsive taps, while someone who waits too cautiously can avoid false alarms but miss targets.
A healthy-adult study illustrates how much the task design matters. In an 80-percent-go condition, there were no misses at baseline, mean go reaction time was 324.94 milliseconds, and false alarms averaged 7.2 percent. After 24 hours, reaction time improved to 315.22 milliseconds while false alarms rose to 9.7 percent, a visible speed-accuracy tradeoff.
Do the test right now
- 1Open Signal Stream in Gyroscope and read the target-shape rule before starting. A run takes about 75 seconds.
- 2Watch the center of the screen and tap whenever the target appears.
- 3Let every distractor pass without tapping. Do not chase speed by guessing what comes next.
- 4Keep hit rate, false-alarm rate, and go reaction time. Read speed only alongside both kinds of error.
Reference bands
There is no portable Go/No-Go norm because target frequency, timing, and stimuli change the response strategy. The published results below document one 80-percent-go protocol in 100 adults aged 18–31.
| Session | Go reaction time | False alarms |
|---|---|---|
| Baseline | 324.94 ms | 7.2% |
| 24 hours later | 315.22 ms | 9.7% |
Jones et al., Frontiers in Psychology, 2016
Gyroscope uses practical flags for Signal Stream. They are prompts to inspect the run, not clinical cutoffs.
| Signal Stream result | Practical read |
|---|---|
| Hits 90% or more and false alarms under 20% | Engaged and controlled |
| Hits under 90% | Misses building |
| False alarms 20% or more | Impulsive taps building |
Jones et al., Frontiers in Psychology, 2016. Research context for Gyroscope's practical flags.
What moves your score
Sustained attention is particularly sensitive to lost sleep. Lim and Dinges reviewed 70 articles with 147 tests and found the largest domain effect in lapses of simple attention, Hedges's g -0.776 with a 95 percent confidence interval from -0.96 to -0.60.
Lim and Dinges, Psychological Bulletin, 2010
- Sleep loss and fatigue can add missed targets.
- Stress can push the balance toward rushed taps.
- Illness or alcohol can make a long stream less steady.
- Practice and time of day can change both speed and accuracy.
How to improve
What moves this number is the balance between staying ready and staying patient across the whole stream. The gains come from a still gaze, a fixed way of responding, and the habit of reacting to the shape in front of you instead of the one you expect next.
- Fix your eyes on the center. Pick a point in the middle of the screen and hold it for the whole run. Every glance away is a shape you did not fully see, and most misses start as a wandering eye.
- Rest your thumb, do not hover it. A tense hand fires early. Keep the thumb resting lightly on the glass so each tap is a decision rather than a twitch, which is what keeps false alarms down.
- Respond to the rule, not the rhythm. A random stream still feels patterned. If you catch yourself tapping in time with the shapes, you have started predicting, and the next distractor will catch you.
- Recover from an error by changing nothing. A miss tempts you to speed up and a false alarm tempts you to slow down, and both cost you over the next few shapes. Take the next one exactly as you took the first.
- One run per session. A second run straight after the first measures fatigue more than attention. If you want practice, do it on a day you are not saving a result.
- Keep caffeine in the same place. Test at the same point in your usual coffee routine. A cup before one run and none before the next moves speed and false alarms more than any real change in you.
Retest once a month, on the same phone, at the same time of day, rested and with the same setup, so each point on the line is comparable and a rise in misses or false alarms means a change in you rather than a change in conditions.
Track it
Log it in the app.
Download Gyroscope and run Signal Stream in about a minute. See how you compare to your peers, to the studies, and to your own baseline over time.
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