On the surface, ‘Simon’ is a simple memory game: It assesses a player’s ability to remember sequences of spatial positions of incrementally increasing length. As such, the game bears close resemblances to one of the most established domains of experimental psychology: memory for lists of ordered items or events, or serial recall.

The main reason why the Simon game deserves to be promoted from a children’s toy to a researcher’s paradigm is the multi-sensory nature and perceptual-motor richness of the task. Each panel is characterized by its position, color and tone. In its traditional version, the spatial position of each game panel is associated with a unique and constant color and tone. However, neither colors nor tones are necessary to play the game, i.e., recalling sequences of spatial positions. As both colors and tones may or may not be correlated with spatial positions, they provide additional sources of information that may or may not be informative about the spatial target dimension. By varying the mappings between spatial positions, colors and tones we are assessing the relative contributions of multiple modalities to the cognitive interplay between attention and memory.

Play Simon at Neave Games.