Demo Tower of London

Tower of London (TOL)

🧠Cognitive Function | Planning

🕒Duration | 10 minutes

🖥️ Devices you can use to take this task | Desktop, Tablet, Mobile

🎯Output | Number of extra moves needed & Completion time

In this famous planning challenge, participants are given a board of three pegs and three beads with varying colours and sizes. Participants are asked to move the beads to solve some problems with minimum moves.

An example of Tower-of-London puzzle. How many moves do you need? The answer is 1. This is the simplest condition. Participants just need to move the green B bead to the shortest peg.

In the current study, there are in total of 14 puzzles, including two 1-move, two 2-move, two 3-move, four 4-move and four 5-move. As the number of moves needed increases, the puzzle gets more difficult. The task progression increases the puzzle difficulty increases gradually as the study progresses.

A special feature of our task is that the board is interactive; i.e., participants need to actually move the beads to respond. In this case, each move is recorded, including the call-back moves that the participants made and the timing of those moves.