Card Shark

Card Shark is an intelligence exercise designed to challenge the brain's ability to retain, compare, and work with more visual information.

​​Here’s how the exercise works: Towards the left of the screen there is a deck of cards. A card is drawn from the deck and is placed face-up on the left side of the equals sign (“=”). Remember this card. After a moment, the card will move from the left side of the equals sign to an empty spot below the equals sign and be placed face down. The card doesn’t change when it’s placed face down. At the same time, a new card from the deck is placed face-up on the left side of the equals sign. The card below then advances to the space to the right of the equals sign, and the new card advances face-down to the empty space below. Another new card is placed to the left of the equals sign.

The challenge is to determine if the face-up card on the left side of the equals sign matches the face-down card on the right side of the equals sign. If they match, select “yes” before time runs out. If they do not match, select “no” before time runs out. If no response is given in time, then an omission is considered an incorrect answer. Once an answer has been submitted, or time has run out, a new card is drawn from the deck and the process repeats.​

In later levels, the number of empty spaces below the equals sign will increase, raising the difficulty to remember a card farther back in the sequence to determine a match.

Tip!: The arrow keys on your keyboard have been enabled for Card Shark. To improve reaction time, leaving fingers on the left and right arrow keys and then pressing to make a selection is usually quicker and more accurate than moving the mouse cursor back and forth to answer yes/no within the time limit. Similarly, on a touchscreen, you can hover fingers over the response buttons and tap quickly. 

Read more in-depth about the science behind Card Shark here.