How Whetstone is built

This is the app's own methodology page, word for word. It is here so it can be read without installing anything.

What this is

Whetstone is three things: a training game, a breath practice, and a short check-in that measures one particular kind of attention.

It is built to train sustained attention. Whether training like this reaches beyond the task being trained is genuinely unsettled — the research is thinner than the industry built on it suggests. The check-in is how we intend to find out, using our own data rather than somebody else’s.

There is no finish line. This is a practice, not a course.

How the three parts are built

The check-in is a version of a task built by Esterman et al. (2013). Pictures fade into one another over about eight tenths of a second instead of appearing — something that appears suddenly takes your attention for you, and something that fades in does not. Nine in ten are cities and you respond to every one. One in ten is a mountain and you do nothing. After a minute of pressing, not pressing is the hard part. That is the load, and telling a city from a mountain is meant to be easy.

It runs four minutes every time and never gets harder, because check-ins of different lengths or different difficulty are not comparable — a task that adapted to you would mean no two of your own results measured the same thing. Your first two do not count, and little is read into any single pair: a task can separate groups of people well and still track one person poorly (Hedge, Powell & Sumner, 2018). You are asked about your room and your sleep beforehand because we cannot make conditions identical, so we record them instead.

The game takes its difficulty rule from von Bastian & Eschen (2016). Score 80% or better and your level goes up next session; below 60% and it goes down. Those numbers are theirs rather than ours, which is the point — a difficulty rule quietly adjusted until more people improve has stopped measuring anything. The same study found no advantage for difficulty that adapts to the player over difficulty that merely varies, so your level exists to put the game somewhere sensible for you rather than because adapting is the active ingredient.

Your level holds for a whole round and never moves inside one: attention fades over a few minutes, and that fade is what the game is training. Session length is prescribed and climbs, to fifteen minutes for the game and twenty for the practice. There is no length selector — offering five, fifteen or twenty-five would mean five every day, including the days the long one was the entire point.

Why the breath practice is almost silent

A voice tells you what to do at the start, says very little in the middle, and stops. That is not minimalism for its own sake. Jha et al. (2015) compared mindfulness training that emphasised doing the practice against training that emphasised explaining it, across a stretch of high demand. The practice-focused version held attention steady. The explanation-focused version did not.

So the app does not teach you about mindfulness. It rings a bell, gets out of the way, and rings a bell. More talking would make it worse.

After a couple of weeks a short open-monitoring segment appears at the end of the session, behind its own bell. That is the ordinary progression in this kind of training: attention on one thing first, attention on whatever arrives second.

What we are not claiming

Training a task makes you better at that task. That much is well established, and a level that climbs and stays up is what it looks like — though for your first several sessions the level is mostly finding where you already are rather than showing you improving.

Whether that reaches any further is a different question, and the honest answer is that the evidence is weak. The largest reviews of this field find good evidence for improvement on the trained task, less for tasks resembling it, and little for everyday life (Simons et al., 2016; Sala et al., 2019). The meditation literature has been criticised on related grounds (Van Dam et al., 2018).

We have run no trial of Whetstone. Measuring something carefully is not the same as having shown it works, and we will not dress the first up as the second.

Whetstone is not a medical device. It does not diagnose, treat or cure anything, and nothing in it is medical advice. We make no claim about your work, your studies or your sport.

What we will say is this: the instrument is real, the numbers are not invented, and nothing in this app is tuned to make you feel like it is working.

References

Every study below informed how something in this app is built. None of them is a study of Whetstone.

  1. Esterman, M., Noonan, S. K., Rosenberg, M., & DeGutis, J. (2013). In the zone or zoning out? Tracking behavioral and neural fluctuations during sustained attention. Cerebral Cortex, 23(11), 2712–2723.The task the check-in is based on, and the reason its pictures fade instead of appearing.
  2. Hedge, C., Powell, G., & Sumner, P. (2018). The reliability paradox: Why robust cognitive tasks do not produce reliable individual differences. Behavior Research Methods, 50(3), 1166–1186.Why nothing is read into a single pair of check-ins, and why the first two do not count.
  3. von Bastian, C. C., & Eschen, A. (2016). Does working memory training have to be adaptive? Psychological Research, 80(2), 181–194.Where the 80% and 60% thresholds come from, and why difficulty varies between sessions rather than adapting inside one.
  4. Jha, A. P., Morrison, A. B., Dainer-Best, J., Parker, S., Rostrup, N., & Stanley, E. A. (2015). Minds "at attention": Mindfulness training curbs attentional lapses in military cohorts. PLOS ONE, 10(2), e0116889.Why the breath practice is nearly all practice and hardly any explanation.
  5. Simons, D. J., Boot, W. R., Charness, N., Gathercole, S. E., Chabris, C. F., Hambrick, D. Z., & Stine-Morrow, E. A. L. (2016). Do "brain-training" programs work? Psychological Science in the Public Interest, 17(3), 103–186.Why this app does not tell you that training it will change your everyday concentration.
  6. Sala, G., Aksayli, N. D., Tatlidil, K. S., Tatsumi, T., Gondo, Y., & Gobet, F. (2019). Near and far transfer in cognitive training: A second-order meta-analysis. Collabra: Psychology, 5(1), 18.The same limit, measured across the whole field at once.
  7. Van Dam, N. T., van Vugt, M. K., Vago, D. R., Schmalzl, L., Saron, C. D., Olendzki, A., et al. (2018). Mind the hype: A critical evaluation and prescriptive agenda for research on mindfulness and meditation. Perspectives on Psychological Science, 13(1), 36–61.Why the same caution applies to the breath practice as to the game.

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