Flanker Test (Arrows Game) Explained: Rules, Scoring and Strategy

The flanker test looks like the easiest game in the whole assessment: five arrows appear, and you press the direction of the middle one. Then the outer arrows start pointing the wrong way, your finger follows them, and your accuracy quietly falls apart. That is the point of the game.

What is the flanker test?

The flanker task (based on the classic Eriksen flanker paradigm) shows a row of arrows — typically five — and asks you to respond to the centre arrow while ignoring the "flankers" on either side. Trials come in two flavours:

• Congruent — all arrows point the same way (→ → → → →). Easy and fast.
• Incongruent — the flankers point against the target (→ → ← → →). This is where errors happen.

Assessment versions run 20–40 rapid trials, usually with under two seconds each. It measures attention control (sometimes called inhibitory control): your ability to act on the relevant signal and suppress the irrelevant one. Employers care because it correlates with staying accurate in noisy, distracting environments.

How is the flanker test scored?

Two numbers matter, and they are combined:

• Accuracy — the percentage of correct responses. Random mashing is easy to detect and scores terribly.
• Reaction time — how quickly you answer, especially on incongruent trials.

The interesting derived metric is the flanker effect: how much slower (and less accurate) you are on incongruent trials than congruent ones. Most people are 30–80 ms slower when the flankers conflict; strong performers keep that gap small while staying above ~95% accuracy. A tiny reaction-time win means nothing if it comes with sloppy errors — in most scoring models, an error costs more than a slow correct answer.

Why the outer arrows are so hard to ignore

Your visual system processes the whole row in parallel before "you" get a say — the flankers trigger a response impulse a few dozen milliseconds before the centre arrow wins. When you answer too fast, you are often answering their direction, not the target's. That is why the classic failure mode is a burst of fast wrong answers, not slow ones.

Strategy: how to get faster without losing accuracy

• Lock your eyes on the centre position. The arrows always appear in the same place. Fixate where the middle arrow will be and let the flankers fall into peripheral vision instead of reading the row left-to-right.
• Let the impulse pass. On incongruent trials there is a real conflict signal in your motor system. A deliberate beat — think "see it, then press" — costs ~50 ms and saves whole errors.
• Keep a metronome rhythm. Sprint-and-stall pacing produces error bursts. A steady tempo, slightly below your maximum speed, wins on the combined score. The same rhythm advice applies to the reaction time game.
• Use both hands on a keyboard. If the game accepts left/right keys, one finger per direction removes travel time.
• Do not chase a mistake. One error is priced in; the two panicked errors after it are not.

Flanker vs Stroop: same skill, different disguise

Both games measure interference control. The Stroop test makes a word fight the ink colour; the flanker makes neighbouring arrows fight the target. If one of them feels hard, practise both — the "respond to the signal, suppress the noise" skill transfers, and assessments often include the pair.

Practise the real mechanic

Unfamiliarity, not ability, is what costs most candidates points — the first thirty seconds of rule-learning are pure score loss. Play the free flanker arrows game until incongruent trials stop feeling like traps, then check the 10 tips for passing game assessments and the complete guide to game-based assessments for the rest of the battery.