Can you get faster?

If you play One Frame regularly you'll almost certainly get better at it, though whether that makes you quicker at anything else is much less certain. This page goes through what the research says, followed by some tips that make a real difference to a round.

What practice improves

Practising a visual task nearly always makes you better at it, an effect researchers call perceptual learning. People who repeatedly try to spot a faint line or tell two textures apart get measurably better over days and weeks. A 2011 review by Dov Sagi describes how reliable this improvement is, and also how specific it tends to be, since the gains often stay tied to the exact task that was practised and carry over only partly to new ones.

Some of your early improvement in One Frame will come from getting used to the game itself, as you learn where the photo appears, when it's coming and how much detail you can expect at each speed.

Knowing the subject helps most

The biggest difference comes from knowing the subject well. Experts recognise things in their field faster and from less information, to the point that car and bird experts use face-recognition areas of the brain when they look at cars and birds (Gauthier and colleagues, 2000), and radiologists can sense that a scan is abnormal within half a second (Evans and colleagues, 2013).

You can build this up on purpose by learning the features that tell things apart at a glance rather than the fine details. For animals, that means body shape and posture, ears, horns, tails, coat patterns and where the animal is standing. For cars, look at the shape of the grille and headlights, the roofline and the proportions of the body. For landmarks, the outline against the sky, the materials and colours, and the surroundings, whether that's water, mountains or a city, tell you the most. The reveal after each round makes good study material, so take a moment to notice what would have given the photo away.

Brain training and video games

The evidence on whether this kind of training makes you faster in general is mixed, and we'd rather be straight with you about it.

• In the ACTIVE trial (Ball and colleagues, 2002), older adults who trained on quick visual tasks got much faster at those tasks and kept the gains for years, although researchers still disagree about how much it helped in everyday life.
• A large review of brain-training programs by Daniel Simons and colleagues (2016) found good evidence that people improve at the tasks they practise, less evidence that this helps with closely related tasks, and little evidence that it improves everyday thinking.
• Shawn Green and Daphne Bavelier (2003) found that people who play action video games outperform non-players on several visual attention tasks, and that training non-players produced some gains. A 2018 meta-analysis by Bediou and colleagues found moderate improvements in perception and attention, while noting that comparing players with non-players can't fully separate cause from effect.

So play One Frame because you enjoy it and because you'll get better at it, rather than expecting it to speed up your brain in general. We don't claim it improves anything outside the game.

Hold on to what you saw

For a fraction of a second after the photo disappears you still have something to work with, and then it fades. Research on conceptual short-term memory (Potter, 2012) suggests that what you recognise is forgotten within about a second unless you hold on to it, and a few habits help with that.

• As soon as the photo is gone, settle on a broad answer such as bird, sports car or tower, and then narrow it down if you can, because your first impression is usually the most reliable thing you've got.
• Picture the shape again and ask yourself what it looked most like, but don't try to put every detail into words. Studies of verbal overshadowing (Schooler and Engstler-Schooler, 1990) found that describing a face at length can make it harder to recognise afterwards.
• Compare your guess with the answer when the photo comes back, since that kind of feedback is what drives perceptual learning. Trying to recall something before you check it also strengthens your memory of it: Roediger and Karpicke (2006) found that testing yourself beats re-reading for remembering information, and Lionel Standing (1973) showed that people who looked through 10,000 pictures could still recognise them with remarkable accuracy.

Tips for a good round

• Play when you're alert, since tiredness slows down visual processing more than almost anything else.
• Turn your screen brightness up, avoid glare and reflections, and hold your phone at a normal reading distance.
• Keep your eyes on the dot until the photo appears, and blink before you press Ready rather than after.
• Stay relaxed and breathe normally, because tensing up or holding your breath won't help you see.
• Always have a guess, since a broad answer still scores and a wrong one costs you nothing, and save "I didn't catch it" for when you really saw nothing at all.

Tracking your progress

Your daily score will jump around because the photos change, so the number to watch is your seeing speed, which is the shortest flash at which you name about half the photos. It appears once you've finished two dailies, it's worked out from your last 30 days, and it goes down as you get faster. Your stats page also shows how often you name the photo at each flash length, so you can see exactly where you start to lose it.

Sources

• Ball, K., Berch, D. B., Helmers, K. F., Jobe, J. B., Leveck, M. D., Marsiske, M., et al. (2002). Effects of cognitive training interventions with older adults: A randomized controlled trial. JAMA, 288, 2271–2281.
• Bediou, B., Adams, D. M., Mayer, R. E., Tipton, E., Green, C. S., & Bavelier, D. (2018). Meta-analysis of action video game impact on perceptual, attentional, and cognitive skills. Psychological Bulletin, 144, 77–110.
• Evans, K. K., Georgian-Smith, D., Tambouret, R., Birdwell, R. L., & Wolfe, J. M. (2013). The gist of the abnormal: Above-chance medical decision making in the blink of an eye. Psychonomic Bulletin & Review, 20, 1170–1175.
• Gauthier, I., Skudlarski, P., Gore, J. C., & Anderson, A. W. (2000). Expertise for cars and birds recruits brain areas involved in face recognition. Nature Neuroscience, 3, 191–197.
• Green, C. S., & Bavelier, D. (2003). Action video game modifies visual selective attention. Nature, 423, 534–537.
• Potter, M. C. (2012). Conceptual short term memory in perception and thought. Frontiers in Psychology, 3, 113.
• Roediger, H. L., & Karpicke, J. D. (2006). Test-enhanced learning: Taking memory tests improves long-term retention. Psychological Science, 17, 249–255.
• Sagi, D. (2011). Perceptual learning in Vision Research. Vision Research, 51, 1552–1566.
• Schooler, J. W., & Engstler-Schooler, T. Y. (1990). Verbal overshadowing of visual memories: Some things are better left unsaid. Cognitive Psychology, 22, 36–71.
• Simons, D. J., Boot, W. R., Charness, N., Gathercole, S. E., Chabris, C. F., Hambrick, D. Z., & Stine-Morrow, E. A. L. (2016). Do "brain-training" programs work? Psychological Science in the Public Interest, 17, 103–186.
• Standing, L. (1973). Learning 10,000 pictures. Quarterly Journal of Experimental Psychology, 25, 207–222.