Our Story
It started with a slide carousel.
In 1988, at Southern Illinois University, Dr. Ashford projected images onto a wall and asked a room full of people to call out when they saw a repeat. They marked their answers on paper scorecards. That was MemTrax — the whole thing.
A test you could give to a room.
Dr. Ashford took it on the road — retirement homes, elderly communities, anywhere people would gather to hear about memory. He'd run the slides, the audience would watch, and everyone would mark down whether they'd seen that picture before. Simple enough to administer to a hundred people at once, rigorous enough to mean something.
I volunteered at those events during my college years. As a computer gamer and technology enthusiast, I had what seemed like an obvious thought: this should be online, where anyone in the world could take it. It turned out my father and his colleagues had already been building a computerized version — one that could vary the images and score itself automatically.
The two ideas met, and MemTrax.com became possible.
The first version was rough.
Vague instructions. Pixelated images. A mathematical score that was hard to interpret even if you were a professional. We ran versions across .com, .net, and .org before we found the one that actually worked for people.
We found a way to collaborate in peace — for the most part — and kept building. The breakthrough was randomization: algorithms that select different order sets and different image sets, so no two MemTrax tests are ever the same. That's what makes it the first online memory test you can take precisely, repeatedly, and frequently, with reliable test–retest measurement.
A single score tells you very little. A score you can trust to be comparable to your own score from last year tells you almost everything.
A thermometer sits in every exam room to measure temperature. We want MemTrax to be there to measure brain health.
Built by family and friends.
MemTrax LLC exists because development is expensive, servers cost money, and a father-and-son project needed a structure to keep going. Friends stepped in — helping start the business, bringing web skills the site still runs on today.
We've stayed independent the entire time. That means we answer to the people taking the test rather than to outside investors, and we reinvest earnings into the work: better tools for managing brain health, better evidence, and wider access.
Looking forward.
The test is running. The work now is making it better and putting it where it matters.
Every user improves the test
The more people take MemTrax, the more precise the norms become. Everyone who takes it is contributing to the accuracy of everyone else's result — and to memory science generally.
Research partnerships
We're working with research groups to run studies that improve the MemTrax toolkit and deepen the evidence base behind continuous-recognition screening.
MemTrax Plus
A planned series of cognitive assessments covering different areas of brain function — the same standard we set for the memory test: quick, simple, precise, reliable.
In the exam room
We want clinicians using MemTrax to monitor patients over time and catch the first possible signs of change — routine, longitudinal, and unremarkable in the best sense.
Take the test that started it all.
Three minutes, no preparation. However far it's come from a slide projector, the idea hasn't changed: watch the images, and tell us when you've seen one before.