The average sequence memory score is about level 10 on Human Benchmark. See your percentile, why you beat the lab average of 6, and how to score higher.
Published October 23, 2026
The average sequence memory score is about level 10 on Human Benchmark, the site that made the test popular: its 35,868 graded results have a mean of 9.9, and about half of all runs end at level 9 or earlier. Human Benchmark scores the level where you make your first mistake, so a typical player repeats 9 tiles in a row. The HumanRank sequence memory test uses the same 3×3 grid and adds one tile per round.
That is odd, because psychologists have measured this skill for 50 years, and in the lab the average adult repeats only about 6. The gap says a lot about how memory works.
Repeat 12 tiles without a mistake and you beat 3 in 4 players.
Take the sequence memory test
Percentiles from the 35,868 results Human Benchmark grades sequence memory scores against, read on October 23, 2026. Human Benchmark ends the run at your first mistake and scores that level. HumanRank gives you 3 lives and scores the longest sequence you clear, so compare the first life loss marked on your result curve. 6% of runs end before level 3, and about 1% reach level 25.
In 1972, P. M. Corsi, a PhD student of neuropsychologist Brenda Milner at McGill University in Montreal, set nine blocks on a board. The examiner taps a few blocks in order, and you tap them back. Every trial is a new sequence, and they get longer until you fail. The Corsi block-tapping test is still used in clinics, and in normative data published by Roy Kessels and colleagues in 2000, healthy adults averaged a span of 6.2 blocks.
The online test looks the same, with one big difference: the sequence never resets. Each round replays everything from the first tile and adds one at the end. That is the rule of Simon, the four-button toy Milton Bradley launched at Studio 54 in New York in May 1978. By the time you clear level 10, you have watched 55 flashes and tapped 55 tiles, but only 10 of them were new. The first tile alone came back 10 times.
That repetition is the cheat code, and it has a name. In 1961, Donald Hebb, Milner's own PhD supervisor at McGill, had people repeat 24 lists of nine digits. Without telling them, he made every third list the same one. Recall of that list kept improving each time it came back, while the others stayed flat. Corsi built his blocks as a spatial version of Hebb's experiment, to study patients who had part of a temporal lobe removed to treat epilepsy.
So the sequence memory test is less a span test than a learning test. The early tiles turn into a pattern you know, the way a phone number sticks after you dial it a few times, and your working memory only has to carry the newest steps. Your run ends when new tiles pile up faster than repetition can lock in the old ones.
Chunking is also how people stretch their digit span in the number memory test. When your run is done, see where it ranks on the sequence memory leaderboard, or test a different kind of spatial memory with the visual memory test and the chimp test.
About level 10 on Human Benchmark. Its 35,868 results, read on October 23, 2026, have a mean of 9.9, and about half of all runs end at level 9 or earlier. Since the score is the level of your first mistake, a typical player repeats about 9 tiles.
Reaching level 12 beats 70% of players, level 15 beats 88%, level 18 puts you in the top 5%, and level 25 in the top 1%.
Yes. A first mistake at level 15 is better than 88% of Human Benchmark results, so you are in the top 12% of players.
A clinical test of visuospatial short-term memory created by Corsi at McGill University in 1972. An examiner taps nine blocks in a new random order on each trial, and you tap them back. Healthy adults average a span of about 6 blocks. Unlike the online sequence memory test, the sequence never carries over from one trial to the next.
It follows the same rule: one sequence that grows by one step each round and replays from the start. Simon, launched by Milton Bradley in 1978, has four colored buttons; the sequence memory test has a 3×3 grid of nine tiles.
