Perceptle

What is Perceptle?

Perceptle is a daily perception test: five tiny trials of the instincts your eyes and ears produce before you have time to think about them. Estimating how many dots just flashed. Guessing where a moving ball was heading. Matching an angle by hand. Holding a beat in your head. Cutting a line at a fraction you were told once.

There are no words to spell and no facts to recall, so nothing you already know will help you here. You get about two minutes, one number out of 100 at the end, and a different set of trials when the page loads on the next day.

The five trials in Perceptle

Each set runs the same five probes in the same order, so a bad run is easy to find and a good one is easy to repeat.

• 01
  Count

  A cluster of dots appears for a moment and then vanishes. You give the number that was actually there.

• 02
  Track

  A ball crosses the field and disappears before it stops. You guess where it would have ended up.

• 03
  Angle

  A handle is drawn at some angle. You drag it until it sits where the trial asked, with no protractor and no grid to help.

• 04
  Tempo

  Four beats play. Then you keep the next eight going on your own, with nothing left to listen to. This is the one trial that needs sound.

• 05
  Split

  A line with a fraction attached. You cut it, starting from the end it marks, at that fraction of the whole.

How to play Perceptle

Everything in Perceptle is a drag, a tap or a listen. There is nothing to type and nothing to look up, and each trial tells you in one line what it is measuring.

On a computer

Use the mouse. Angle and Split are click-and-drag: press on the handle or the cut point, move it to where you want it, and let go when it looks right. Count and Track only need a click or a short drag once the flash or the ball is over.

On a phone or tablet

Tap and drag with one finger, the same way. The whole test panel scales to the screen, and the fullscreen button beside the game gives you a taller, cleaner field in the middle of a phone — worth using for Track and Split, where the edges matter.

Turn the sound on

Tempo cannot be played silently. Raise your volume before you press Play Perceptle, and if you are on a phone check that silent mode is off. Headphones help, mostly because they keep your own finger taps out of the recording.

How Perceptle is scored

Every trial turns your answer into an error: how far off the real count, landing spot, angle, beat or proportion you were. The five errors are averaged and rounded into a single score out of 100, where a perfect run would mean you were exactly right five times in a row.

Only two letter grades exist. A starts at 85 and S at 95. There is no grade below A, so a score in the seventies is meant to look like what it is: a set of instincts that are close but not calibrated.

The Friday Perceptle

On Fridays the same five trials change shape. The dots move instead of flashing, the ball bounces before it disappears, angles go all the way round the circle, the beats get subdivided, and the fractions run out past the end of the line. Same two minutes, same scale, considerably harder to eyeball.

Perceptle tips that actually help

• Get the audio working first. Tempo is a fifth of your score and there is nothing to see during it. If the beats were silent, stop and reload before you play on.
• Count in chunks. When the dots flash, grab a group of five or six and use that as a unit instead of trying to name each dot.
• Read the first half of the ball, not the last. Speed and direction are clearest early in the crossing; the end of the path is where the eye starts guessing.
• Decide the fraction before you touch the line. Once your finger is on the cut point you are estimating twice — once for the fraction, once for the drag.
• Use Keep playing as practice. It deals a random set of the same five trials, so you can warm up without spending your daily run. Archive opens the days you missed.
• Come back tomorrow. The set changes with the date on your own device, so your midnight is the reset, not ours.