Study 1 · 60 seconds · Pilot. Open to invited testers.
Memory horizon
Can you name your four grandparents? Your eight great-grandparents? Where does your family go dark, and does it go dark on one side first?
Why I am asking
This one fails my usefulness test and passes the other one: I would run it with nobody watching. I want to know how far back a person carries names.
What I expect
Written down before anyone answers. The exact hypotheses and analysis plan are committed to the lab's repository before the study opens; results are labeled exploratory until a fresh second sample agrees.
Ancestry's 2022 survey of about 2,100 Americans found that 47% could name all four grandparents and 4% could name all eight great-grandparents. That is the prior. What nobody has measured is the shape of the darkness.
- People who show up to a study like this will beat 47%. That is self-selection, and we will say so, not a finding.
- The mother's line survives longer than the father's: more maternal than paternal great-grandparents named, for most people who can name any.
- Believing you know a name and being able to type its first letter are different. The gap is a few points for grandparents and larger for great-grandparents.
What you get
Your horizon drawn as a small family tree with the known names lit, against the crowd's, and a line saying where your family goes dark and on which side. Nothing you type is stored except that a letter was typed.
What we store
Your answers, how long you took, a random ID your browser makes, whether you are on a phone, and two optional questions: age band and first language. No name, email, or IP address. Anonymized data is published when the study closes. Privacy.