ConductCognition

Executive Function

One-Touch Tower Planning Task

Assess planning by judging, without moving any balls, the fewest moves that turn one Tower of London arrangement into another.

Useful for executive-function research, planning endpoints, and remote Tower of London-style batteries.

Executive function5-6 minUntimedPaid plans and pay as you go
Preview
Cognitive test preview

What this task measures

Measures planning by asking participants to judge the minimum number of moves needed to transform one Tower of London arrangement into another.

Core constructs

  • Planning
  • Executive function
  • Problem solving
  • Look-ahead search

Research fit

  • Executive-function batteries
  • Planning and frontal-systems research
  • Remote neuropsychology-inspired studies
  • CANTAB-adjacent batteries that need touchless Tower of London coverage

Why researchers use ConductCognition

  • Hosted browser delivery with no local install burden for participants.
  • Study setup, scoring, exports, and participant links in one workflow.
  • Published prices per participant or per year: see pricing.
  • A free plan for pilots, then pay as you go or a yearly plan for every test and trial-level exports.

Paradigm overview

One-Touch Tower Planning is a touchless Tower of London planning task. Participants compare a current and target arrangement of three colored balls and choose the minimum number of legal moves needed to transform one into the other.

The implementation generates non-proprietary Tower states programmatically and computes optimal move counts with breadth-first search. It uses the published one-touch, think-then-answer variant rather than a drag-and-drop execution task.

Key scoring outputs

First-Choice Solved

count

Number of problems answered correctly on the first move-count choice.

Higher is better

First-Choice Latency

ms

Average time before the first move-count answer.

Lower is better

Correct-Choice Latency

ms

Average response latency on correctly solved problems.

Lower is better

2-Move Accuracy

proportion

Accuracy for 2-move problems.

Higher is better

3-Move Accuracy

proportion

Accuracy for 3-move problems.

Higher is better

4-Move Accuracy

proportion

Accuracy for 4-move problems.

Higher is better

5-Move Accuracy

proportion

Accuracy for 5-move problems.

Higher is better

Running this test

Participants and results

  • Untimed test: runs on desktops, laptops and tablets.
  • Task text: English.
  • Available on: Paid plans and pay as you go.
  • No percentile. Scores and quality flags only. How norms work
  • Recruiting online? See the setup guides for Prolific, Sona Systems, CloudResearch Connect and Qualtrics.

Settings you can change

SettingStandardAllowed
Number of problems208 to 32
Response timeout (ms)30,00010,000 to 60,000

Yearly plans can change settings within these limits. Free and pay-as-you-go studies use the standard settings.

Research evidence and scoring context

Culbertson WC & Zillmer EA (2001). Tower of London - Drexel University, Second Edition (TOL-DX) Manual.

N 5877-80

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Related task pages

Tower PlanningTrail Making Test BStroop Color-Word Test

Cite this test

Paradigm source: Culbertson & Zillmer (2001); Tower of London planning paradigm.

ConductCognition versions: task version 1.0.0, scoring version 1.0.0. Every export records the versions each session used, for a methods section.

Research FAQ

Common questions about this online cognitive test

How long does the One-Touch Tower Planning Task take?

About 5 to 6 minutes, as listed in the test library.

What device does a participant need?

Untimed test: runs on desktops, laptops and tablets. The browser must be Chrome, Edge, Firefox or Safari.

What scores does it produce?

First-Choice Solved, First-Choice Latency, Correct-Choice Latency, 2-Move Accuracy, 3-Move Accuracy, 4-Move Accuracy and 5-Move Accuracy. Each session is also marked valid, needs review or invalid, with the reason.

Does it report a percentile?

No. Scores and quality flags only.

Which settings can a researcher change?

number of problems (8 to 32) and response timeout (ms) (10,000 to 60,000). Settings can be changed on yearly plans; free and pay-as-you-go studies use the standard settings.

Which languages can participants use?

The test's own text is in English. Participant pages can be in Italian on yearly plans, but this test's screens stay in English.

Is this a clinical test?

No. ConductCognition is for research use only. It runs, scores and exports the test; clinical interpretation is outside the platform.

Every test: the full test list.