Swarm
A few dots flash green. Then every dot looks the same and scatters. Track the ones you memorized.
How to Play
A handful of dots flash mint-green for a moment — those are your targets. Memorize them.
Then every dot turns identical and starts moving. Keep your eyes on the ones you were told to track, even as they cross paths with the rest.
When the dots stop, tap only the ones you were tracking. Any wrong tap ends the round immediately.
Three lives, five rounds a level. The dot count and target count both climb as you level up — by Level 5 you're tracking four dots among ten.
The Science Behind Swarm
Swarm is a live version of the multiple object tracking (MOT) paradigm — a task researchers have used for decades to study how attention handles more than one moving thing at once. The classic version, developed by Zenon Pylyshyn and Ron Storm in the late 1980s, is close to identical to this: a subset of identical objects is briefly marked, then everything moves, and the viewer has to keep mentally 'tagging' the marked ones without any visual cue to help.
What makes MOT interesting is that it isn't just fast reflexes. You can't outrun it by reacting quicker — the targets and distractors are visually identical during the tracking phase, so there's nothing to react to. The only thing that works is sustained, effortful tracking, updating each target's position in your head as it moves.
Attention research generally puts the limit at three to four objects that most people can track reliably at once — which is part of why Swarm's difficulty curve adds a target at Level 3 rather than starting there. Below that limit, tracking is fairly robust. Past it, it tends to break down fast, not gradually.
Tips to Improve Your Score
- Don't stare at a single dot. Locking your gaze onto one target and losing the others in your peripheral vision is the most common way tracking collapses. A slightly wider, softer focus across all the targets holds up better.
- Near-misses are the real test. Tracking rarely fails when dots are far apart — it fails in the moment two dots cross paths and swap which one 'looks' like the target you were watching.
- A wrong tap costs the same as running out of time. There's no benefit to guessing early. If you're not sure, keep watching until you are.
FAQ
What is multiple object tracking (MOT)?
A cognitive science paradigm where a subset of identical-looking objects is tracked by attention alone as they move among distractors, without any visual difference to rely on once movement starts.
How many dots can people usually track?
Research generally finds three to four moving objects is the reliable limit for most people, which is why Swarm's difficulty only reaches four targets at its hardest level.
Why do the dots all look the same once they start moving?
That's the entire point of the task — if targets stayed visually marked, it would just be a reaction-time test. Removing the marker forces the tracking to happen in attention, not in what's on screen.
What ends a run?
Three missed rounds — either tapping a dot that wasn't a target, or running out of time in the response window.