Who’s Home?
Watch who walks into the little house and who walks out, then say how many are still inside.
How to play
- When the roof lifts, see how many critters are home.
- The roof closes and they start to come and go. Add one for every critter that walks in the door, and take one away for every critter that walks out.
- Critters walking along the hill behind the house are only passing by — they don’t count.
- When it goes quiet, tap how many are inside, or press a number key. The roof lifts to show you.
- A right answer makes the next house busier and a miss makes it calmer. Eight houses make a session.
What it trains
- Keeping a running count up to date while it keeps changing — the updating side of working memory
- Following two directions of traffic at once, and leaving the passers-by out of the total
- Houses that get busier or calmer after every answer, so each session sits at the pace you can hold
Who’s Home? is a counting game you play in your head. A few critters are inside a little house when the roof lifts; then it closes, and they start to come and go — one slips in from the left, two hurry out to the right, someone ambles past on the hill behind. When the path goes quiet, tap how many are home and the roof comes off to show you. Count right and the next house is busier; miss and it settles down, so every session is played at the pace you can keep. Eight houses take about three minutes.
The science behind it
Peer-reviewed studies this exercise draws on.
- Brain training game improves executive functions and processing speed in the elderly: A randomized controlled trial Nouchi, Taki, Takeuchi, Hashizume, Akitsuki, Shigemune, Sekiguchi, Kotozaki, Tsukiura, Yomogida & Kawashima (2012). PLoS ONE, 7(1), e29676.
- Transfer of learning after updating training mediated by the striatum Dahlin, Neely, Larsson, Bäckman & Nyberg (2008). Science, 320, 1510–1512.
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