Above the 75th percentile
Six steps and up means you were holding the order rather than a picture of the grid: which cell flashed first, which second. Those are two different skills, and the second one fails earlier — positions are usually remembered longer than sequence. On longer runs almost everyone switches to a route: not nine separate cells but a line the eye walks through. That traversal is what separates the top of the scale. A caveat about transfer: a high score does not promise you will remember where on the shelf you left something — that is recognising a setting, not replaying a sequence. The nearest thing to this task in our catalogue is a test of its own, the chimp test, where the cells must be cleared in order with no flashes at all.
Middle: 25–75
Four or five steps is the most common length, and it usually ends the same way: you remember every cell but swap the order of two of them. That is the task's normal limit. A three-by-three grid gives nine positions, each flash lives seven hundred milliseconds, and by the fifth step you are holding both the trail of previous cells and the one lighting up now. What moves the result most in this zone is not memory but the decision to watch the centre of the screen instead of tracking each flash with your eyes: a saccade costs time you no longer have at seven hundred milliseconds.
Below the 25th percentile
Three steps is a short sequence, and at that length the result says more about the screen than about memory. The task depends on seeing the whole flash: on a phone the grid is smaller, a finger covers part of the field, and a seven-hundred-millisecond light forgives no glance away. Count the rest of it too — one session, one device, one minute. The number carries no diagnostic value, and it says nothing about visual memory in life: faces, routes, where things are kept. It measures one narrow thing: how many lit cells you repeated in the right order.