UTOK

UTOK has six short tasks taken from attention and memory research: Stroop, n-back, Schulte table, go/no-go, Corsi block span and task switching.

Each one goes by a plain name in the app (Colour Word, Position Back, Number Grid, Tap Unless, Block Span, Rule Switch), and the About page says what researchers use it to measure.

A day's session is three of them, about five minutes. The three change every day, so two days cover all six. Every task has ten levels and moves up or down after each round based on how you did.

You will get better at these tasks with practice. That part is well established. Whether it carries over to the rest of your life is contested, and the best-controlled studies find little or none. So UTOK makes no claims about intelligence, work, school or ageing. It's a short daily exercise you can measure.

Your scores are compared only with your own history, game by game: level, best score, the median of your last five rounds, and your last thirty.

It's free, with no ads, purchases, account or tracking. It works offline, and everything stays on your device.

Utok is Tagalog and Cebuano for brain.

Discovery signals