I’ve always had a bad short-term memory; it’s atrocious. For most of my life, I’ve gotten by with rough heuristics and systems I’ve developed for maintaining some semblence of functionality. Recently, however, my inadequacy in recollection has begun to take more and more of a toll.
In 2008, some groundbreaking research was presented in the Proceedings of the National Acadamy of Sciences. This research suggested that not only was our understanding of fluid intelligence being somehow fixed at birth wrong, fluid intelligence and working memory share many of the same cognitive structures, and can be improved with simple memory games.
One such game, the so-called dual n-back continuous performance task, is simple, straightforward, and can be implemented for Android in a weekend, with time to spare for skiing. :)
This is my first Android application, and moreover, my first non-academic Java application, so it sucks hardcore, and it sucks more than just the standard amount of suck that Java brings into the equation. But it seems to work okay.
This is also my first GitHub submission, and it appears GitHub has decided to hate my mime-types, so you may have to right-click and select “save as” to download the APK or something screwy. Who knows.
This app requires Android 1.6 or newer due to the use of the built-in voice synthesis API for the auditory memory task.