04

Pymetrics keypress game practice

Game 4 of 12 · about 2 min

One button, two minutes. While it is green, tap it as fast as you can. The moment it turns red, stop completely. It changes without warning.

Impulsivity Motor control Stamina

Unofficial practice. Not the real Pymetrics game and not connected to Pymetrics, Harver or any employer. A 2-minute run, unlimited retries, nothing saved and nothing sent anywhere.

How the Pymetrics keypress game works

  1. Green and it says GO: tap the button as fast as you can.
  2. Red and it says STOP: do not tap it at all.
  3. The switch comes without warning, and never on a rhythm you can count.
  4. Nothing pauses at a change. The clock runs straight through both.
  5. There is one round and it lasts the full two minutes. No lives, no score to climb.
  6. Tap with the button, or with space or enter if you prefer the keyboard.
  7. This practice run is the full two minutes, same as the real thing. Retry as often as you like.

What the keypress game measures

Two things at once. Taps during a red period are the impulse measure, and because the switch is unpredictable the only way to keep that at zero is to genuinely stop rather than to time it. Across the full two minutes it also watches whether your tapping speed holds up or falls away, which is why the round is long enough to get tiring.

Or play all 12 in one sitting

This page is the keypress game on its own, practice only. The full run is the rehearsal. All 12 back to back in the order the real assessment most commonly uses them, timed, one attempt each, and no feedback until the end. About 35 minutes, and nothing is saved, so it needs one sitting.

Take the full timed run

All 12 Pymetrics games

Next: cards game
01Balloon 02Digits 03Arrows 04Keypress 05Cards 06Money Exchange 1 07Money Exchange 2 08Easy or Hard 09Lengths 10Faces 11Stop 12Towers All 12 games

About the Pymetrics keypress game

Answered straight, including the parts people would rather hear differently.

Because the length is part of the measurement. A thirty-second version would read impulse control and nothing else. Stretched to two minutes it also picks up whether your speed drops as your hand tires, which is a separate thing about you and needs time to show up.
You can, and it will show. Hanging back keeps the red periods clean but flattens your tapping speed and slows how quickly you get going again after each stop. The pattern of a very cautious player looks quite different from a fast one who stops well.
It is not counted against you. When you are tapping several times a second, a press is already on its way before you could possibly have seen the colour change, so anything inside the first fifth of a second after a stop is treated as momentum rather than a mistake. Counting those would score the fastest players as the most impulsive, which is backwards.
No, and that is deliberate. Stops land roughly every seven seconds on average, but the wait is built so that it never becomes due — four seconds into a green stretch, the chance the next second brings a stop is the same as it was at three. If it were on a timer you could count it, and then the game would be measuring your counting rather than your control.
The real assessment is a spacebar game. This version leads with a button so it works on a phone, and the spacebar and enter key still do the same thing on a laptop.

Pymetrics and Harver are trademarks of their respective owners and are not affiliated with OpenThinkr. Practice results are for interest and self-reflection, not assessment.