Field test № 04 · ninety seconds

The Focus Check

Five cards in a row. Only the middle one is real. Sort it: flyers left, grounded right.

The neighbors will argue with it. Ignore them. They are not your card.

Sometimes the row agrees and the sort is easy. Sometimes four wrong opinions surround one right answer. The difference between those two speeds is the measurement.

The flanker paradigm, published by Eriksen and Eriksen in 1974. It measures interference cost: how much irrelevant-but-loud information slows a decision about the one thing that matters.