Freeze Frame

Alertness is a critical facet of attention and focus. Although we don’t often realize it, our level of alertness drives success in things like higher-order reasoning, problem solving, learning, and memory.

Scientists have identified two types of alertness: tonic alertness and phasic alertness. These two alertness measures work in concert to determine your attentional state. 

• Tonic alertness describes your overall level of alertness. It is critically involved in sustaining your focus on something, and provides the “tone” that’s necessary for higher-order cognition. 
• Phasic alertness describes the degree to which you can rapidly shape your responses in a given moment. It’s extremely important for “selective attention”— the ability to pay attention to important things while filtering out unimportant things. 

Freeze Frame is an exercise in BrainHQ’s Attention category which targets both tonic and phasic alertness. It requires the brain to maintain a “relaxed and ready” state of alertness over increasingly longer periods. Your task in Freeze Frame is to discriminate between target images and distractor images. When you see a distractor—something that is not the target—you press the response key. When you see the target, you have to “freeze,” or prevent yourself from pressing the response key.

Here’s how the exercise works:

1. You’ll first be presented with a Target Image. Remember this image! Select “Next” when you’re ready.
   
2. An image will appear on screen for a moment.
   • If this is the target image, freeze! Don't select anything.
     
   • If this is not the target image, select “no”. 
     

Tip: If you’re training from a computer, you can use the right arrow key on your keyboard to give a “No” answer.

Regardless of how you answer, the level then continues, repeating from Step 2 above.

The way BrainHQ measures a turn in Freeze Frame is unique compared to all other exercises. Depending on what level you’re training on, you have to respond to 18-30 images in a given turn. The more answers you answer correctly, the less likely the target image will appear, which forces you to concentrate for longer periods of time.

Below is a table that shows a breakdown of how many images will be shown in a given stage of Freeze Frame:

Freeze Frame is what’s known as a Continuous Performance Task (CPT) exercise. This means that speed and accuracy are both important when you are selecting your answers. Because of this, there are two ways to be marked wrong: 

• Selecting the incorrect answer
• Not answering correctly within the time limit

Similar to other BrainHQ exercises, if an incorrect answer is given you’ll hear a “bonk” sound; if a correct answer is given, you’ll hear a “boop” sound. 

You can review the exercise video tutorial below:

Freeze Frame from BrainHQ from Posit Science on Vimeo.