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A Short History of Memory Matching Games

The card-matching memory game has roots stretching back to the early 20th century, when the Pelman Institute (founded in London in 1898 by William Joseph Ennever) popularised the term Pelmanism for memory-training exercises sold as mail-order courses. Pelman's pairs-matching drill became one of dozens of variations marketed for everything from "brain calisthenics" to professional memory. The version most readers know today, with face-down cards laid in a grid, became known as Concentration in the United States after the NBC game show of the same name (1958-1991) put it on national television. Milton Bradley released the boxed game simply called Memory in 1959, with illustrated tiles that became a fixture of children's bedrooms and classrooms; Ravensburger launched their German-language equivalent Memory in 1959 too, and it remains one of the company's best-selling products with more than 50 million units sold by 2019. Digital versions arrived early: an Atari 2600 version shipped in 1978, and the mechanic became a staple of educational software in the 1980s and 1990s, appearing in titles from JumpStart, Reader Rabbit and the BBC Schools series. Today the same simple rules underpin everything from preschool apps (Toca Boca, Khan Academy Kids) to cognitive-training platforms such as Lumosity (2007), Peak (2014) and BrainHQ (Posit Science, 2011), and even neuropsychological assessment batteries such as the CANTAB Paired Associates Learning task used clinically since the 1980s.

What Memory Matching Trains in the Brain

• Visuospatial working memory. Each face-down card forces you to hold both an image and its location in mind. This is precisely the "visuospatial sketchpad" component of Baddeley and Hitch's working-memory model (1974), which remains the dominant framework in cognitive psychology. Repeated short bouts of pairs games appear in dozens of training studies as a tractable way to load this system.
• Spatial encoding and chunking. Strong players don't memorise card-by-card; they cluster positions into 2x2 or row patterns. This use of "chunks" (a term coined by George A. Miller, 1956) is one of the few well-replicated routes to expanding apparent working-memory capacity.
• Sustained and selective attention. Each turn requires you to ignore already-matched cards, suppress irrelevant emoji similarity, and focus on a single hypothesis. This taxes the anterior cingulate cortex and dorsolateral prefrontal cortex, regions repeatedly activated in attention tasks (Petersen and Posner, 2012).
• Executive function and inhibitory control. Resisting the urge to flip the same card twice, planning which unknown card to try next, and updating a mental map of the board all draw on Adele Diamond's three core executive functions (working memory, inhibition, cognitive flexibility), reviewed in Diamond (Annual Review of Psychology, 2013).
• Hippocampal pattern separation. Distinguishing two similar emojis (e.g. dog vs wolf, sushi vs onigiri) recruits the dentate gyrus of the hippocampus, the region most associated with telling similar experiences apart. Studies on healthy ageing (Stark et al., 2013) show this is one of the first capacities to decline, which is part of why matching games appear in dementia-prevention research.

Where People Actually Use a Memory Game

• Primary and preschool classrooms. Teachers use matching games to drill sight words, math facts, sign-language signs, or vocabulary in a second language. Reception and Year 1 teachers in the UK often pair the game with phonics; Maria Montessori's three-period lesson uses an almost identical recall step.
• Speech-language and occupational therapy. SLPs use semantic-theme matching (kitchen items, transport, animals) to elicit naming; OTs use the spatial layout to work on scanning and crossing the midline. The American Speech-Language-Hearing Association (ASHA) lists card-matching as a standard activity in aphasia rehabilitation.
• Dementia and Alzheimer's care. Activity programmes in care homes use larger cards with high-contrast images and reduced grid sizes (2x2, 3x2) as a low-stress engagement task. The Alzheimer's Society and the UK's Care Quality Commission highlight pairs games as suitable for early-to-mid-stage dementia, where reminiscence-themed images (vintage cars, post-war kitchens) work particularly well.
• ADHD and working-memory training. Working-memory deficits affect 80-90% of children with ADHD (Martinussen et al., 2005). Short pairs games (under 5 minutes) suit ADHD attention spans and provide immediate feedback. Programs such as Cogmed (Klingberg et al., 2005) build on this with structured 25-minute daily sessions over 5 weeks.
• Stroke and traumatic-brain-injury recovery. Neuropsychologists use card-matching to assess and rehabilitate visuospatial memory in the post-acute phase. The grid format gives a fast, repeatable measure of progress without requiring fine motor skills.
• Family and intergenerational play. The game is one of the few activities where a five-year-old can genuinely outperform an adult. Researchers including Robert Kail have documented that working-memory development continues into the teens but visuospatial pairs ability peaks early, making it a fair cross-generational game.
• Party games and team-building. Larger grids (4x5, 6x6) work as ice-breakers because the social dynamics (people calling out hints, taking turns) matter as much as the cognitive load. Variants such as Memoryss (a drinking variant) and corporate "remember our brand values" sets exist in the wild.

Strategies That Actually Improve Your Score

• Chunk the board into quadrants. Mentally divide a 4x4 grid into four 2x2 quadrants and number them. When you flip a card, you only need to remember "dog in quadrant 2" rather than its absolute coordinates. This is the same trick chess grandmasters use to remember board positions (de Groot, 1965).
• Sweep before you guess. On the first pass, flip every card row by row rather than jumping around. You'll find some early pairs for free, and you'll build a complete mental map. Players who sweep finish 20-30% faster than players who guess randomly in informal benchmarks.
• Use distinctive visual features. Don't just remember "the bird"; remember "the bird with the orange beak in the top-right corner." The more distinctive the encoded feature, the better the retrieval (Craik and Lockhart's Levels of Processing, 1972).
• When in doubt, flip an unknown first. If your first card is one you've never seen, your second flip should target a known card whose pair you've already located. This converts every guess into either a match or new information, never wasted effort.
• Verbalise quietly. Whisper "dog top-left, pizza bottom-right" as you uncover cards. Adding a verbal channel engages the phonological loop alongside the visuospatial sketchpad and roughly doubles encoding strength for many players.
• Pace your turns. Spending 2-3 seconds staring at each newly-flipped card before turning it back improves consolidation. Rapid flipping is fun but produces shallow memory traces that decay within seconds.
• Take micro-breaks on big grids. On 4x5 or larger, look away for 3-5 seconds between rounds. The brief decay of iconic memory forces you to commit images to short-term memory rather than relying on visual afterimage, which transfers better between sessions.

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