The average visual memory test score is level 11 on Human Benchmark, or 10 levels cleared. See your percentile and why so many runs end at level 9.
Published October 25, 2026
The average visual memory test score is level 11 on Human Benchmark, the site that made the test popular: its 29,243 graded results have a mean of 11.5, and the median run ends at level 11. Human Benchmark scores the level you fail, so a typical player clears 10 levels, the last one with 12 tiles to remember. On the HumanRank visual memory test, which scores the last level you clear, that same run is a 10.
One level stands out in that data: more than 1 in 6 runs end at level 9 exactly. The tile count is not what does it. The board is.
Clear 11 levels and you beat more than half of all players.
Take the visual memory test
The first column counts the levels you clear, which is your HumanRank score. For a Human Benchmark score, add one.
Percentiles from the 29,243 results Human Benchmark grades visual memory scores against, read on October 25, 2026. On both sites, level 1 lights up 3 tiles, each level adds one, and the third wrong tile in a level costs one of your 3 lives. HumanRank shows the tiles a little longer (1.45 s against 1.2 s) and stops growing its board at 6×6, so treat the comparison as approximate.
On Human Benchmark, the board grows in steps: 3×3 at the start, 4×4 at level 3, 5×5 at level 6, 6×6 at level 9 and 7×7 at level 14. The board keeps the same size on screen, so each step also shrinks the tiles. The score data shows a wall at each step.
Level 9 adds just one tile, but it multiplies the number of possible boards by 184, from 3.3 million to 601 million. Level 8, on the same 5×5 board as level 7, only multiplies it by 1.6. The lit tiles also spread out: on average, 6 pairs of them touch at level 8, and only 5 at level 9, even with one more tile to find.
That spread matters because nobody holds 11 separate tiles in mind. In 1997, Steven Luck and Edward Vogel showed in Nature that visual working memory holds about 4 objects at a time. In 2000, Yuhong Jiang, Ingrid Olson and Marvin Chun found that memory stores the layout of a display as a whole: move items to spots that break the layout, and people remember them less well, even when they were only asked about their colors.
So the visual memory test measures how well you turn a pattern into a few shapes: an L here, a diagonal there, a pair of corners. On a crowded board, lit tiles clump into shapes on their own. On a bigger, emptier board, they scatter, and you have to build the shapes yourself.
The same spatial memory powers the chimp test and the sequence memory test, which adds the order the tiles light up in. When your run is done, see where it ranks on the visual memory leaderboard.
About level 11 on Human Benchmark. Its 29,243 results, read on October 25, 2026, have a mean of 11.5 and a median of 11. Human Benchmark scores the level you fail, so a typical player clears 10 levels. HumanRank scores the last level you clear, so the same run is a 10 here.
Clearing 11 levels beats 56% of players, 12 beats 68%, 14 puts you in the top 10%, and 19 in the top 1%. Add one to each for the matching Human Benchmark score.
Yes. A level 15 on Human Benchmark is better than 90% of its results, and clearing 15 levels on HumanRank is better than about 95%.
On Human Benchmark, level 9 is the first level on a 6×6 board. The extra row and column multiply the number of possible patterns by 184 and spread the lit tiles out, so more than 1 in 6 runs end there. The next wall is level 14, where the board grows to 7×7.
About 4 objects at once, according to Luck and Vogel's 1997 study in Nature. Players reach 11 tiles or more by grouping the tiles into a few shapes and remembering those instead.
