Color Memory Test

The color memory test shows a single shade for three seconds, hides it, and asks you to pick it out of five near-identical swatches.

What is Color Memory Test?

A round has two phases. First a large swatch appears under the heading Memorise this color, and the panel notes that it hides after three seconds — a timer runs behind the scenes and the phase changes on its own, so there is no button to press and no way to sit with the colour longer. Then the swatch is replaced by five candidates under the heading Which one was it?, shuffled.

• The five candidates are the exact colour plus four hue-shifted neighbours at plus and minus fifteen and thirty degrees, all generated at the same lightness and chroma.
• The original is therefore always present, and the four decoys are close enough in hue that the choice is made on memory of the shade rather than on recognising a different colour family.

Picking one gives an immediate verdict in the result card: either a confirmation that the exact swatch was found, or a statement of what the target actually was, printed as its hex code. The score card then shows two figures — a fraction of correct answers out of rounds played, and an accuracy percentage computed from the same two numbers, rounded.

The three-second exposure is what makes the test about recall rather than about comparison. With the target on screen it would be trivial; holding a shade in mind for even a few seconds and then choosing between neighbours a few degrees apart is genuinely difficult, and the accuracy figure over several rounds is where a pattern shows up. A score near one in five is what guessing would produce, so the useful reading is anything well above that.

The controls are deliberately thin. One button moves to the next round and doubles as a skip, the previous verdict stays on screen until it is pressed, and the score accumulates for the visit without being stored. There is no difficulty setting, no timer pressure on the guess itself, no distribution of your answers and no record of which hues you get wrong — a chart of that would be more instructive than the accuracy alone.

The test is more revealing over several rounds than in any single one. Because the hue offsets are fixed at fifteen and thirty degrees in both directions, a run of rounds samples the whole wheel, and an accuracy well above the one-in-five that guessing would produce is a real signal of shade memory rather than luck. Repeating a handful of rounds is also the clearest demonstration of a point colour theory keeps making: a few degrees of hue are almost invisible when two swatches are apart, and entirely obvious when they are adjacent.

• Limits: five options per round, one exposure time, a session-only score, no history and no export.
• As a color memory test it is a clean test color recall loop, and for anyone wondering whether they can remember the shade they just saw, the hue discrimination test that follows — plus its color recall score — answers it in a handful of rounds.

How to use Color Memory Test

1. Look at the colour while it is shown; it hides after three seconds.
2. Pick the swatch you believe is the exact shade from the five offered.
3. Press Next round to continue — the score and accuracy build up as rounds accumulate.

When to use Color Memory Test vs related tools

Use this when you want to test shade recall rather than colour knowledge, or to see how much of a difference a few degrees of hue actually makes. Use the naming challenge when the vocabulary is the subject, or the sequence game when order rather than shade is being tested. The simultaneous contrast visualizer shows why a remembered shade shifts, and the naming challenge is the other game in this corner of the catalogue.

Privacy & Security

This tool runs entirely in your browser — no data ever leaves your device. There is no server round-trip, no upload, no logging, and no account required. Your input is processed locally using client-side JavaScript and is never stored, transmitted, or accessible to anyone else. When you close the tab, everything disappears.

Frequently asked questions about Color Memory Test