When Can Kids Play Memory Games? Simpler Rules for Playing Concentration With Preschoolers

In 1996, the psychologist Ruth Schumann-Hengsteler published a study in which 80 children aged 5 to 10 and 32 adults played Concentration while their play was recorded in detail. The starting point was a claim many people have heard: children are better at Concentration than adults. In overall performance, the adults came out ahead.

Concentration, also called Memory or Pairs, is simply a game of turning over two face-down cards and keeping them if they match. A deck of playing cards or a set of picture cards is all you need. Even so, when parents sit down to play it with a preschooler, many wonder what age it really works from, and how strictly to keep the rules. In this post I look at what research says, and then at how to simplify the rules for young children.

Are children really better than adults?

In Schumann-Hengsteler’s study, the children aged 5 to 10 did not differ from each other in overall performance, and the adults did better than all of them. Some of the details are interesting, though. The 10-year-olds and the adults were better at gathering information from the cards, but they also forgot more of what they had seen as the game went on. And the 5-year-olds made the fewest location errors. The author concluded that the results do not support the idea of young children as experts in remembering places.

In a 2019 study by Peter Krøjgaard and colleagues, 34 six-year-olds, 48 eight-year-olds and 38 adults played Concentration on a computer screen. Comparing the number of moves and the time taken to find the first 9 of 12 pairs, the six-year-olds lost to the older children and the adults, but the eight-year-olds did as well as the adults. The authors suggest that adults bring strategies that work in everyday life, and that these may not suit Concentration.

In a 2007 study by Petra Jansen-Osmann and Martin Heil, second graders, sixth graders and adults learned pairings of pictures with positions on a grid, or of pictures with words. Performance improved with age far less for positions than for words. The authors think the ability to learn locations matures early in life.

Putting these together, we cannot say that preschoolers beat adults at Concentration. But by the middle of elementary school, children can sometimes match adults, and memory for places gets close to adult level earlier than memory for words. That may be why children sometimes win.

How memory grows in young children

In a 2004 study, Susan Gathercole and colleagues gave children aged 4 to 15 a range of working memory tasks. On every task, performance rose in a roughly straight line with age. By about age 6, the authors write, the basic structure of working memory found in adults is in place, and from there each part grows a great deal in capacity through the school years into adolescence.

Concentration uses more than memory for the cards. A child also has to wait for their turn, put unmatched cards back face down, and pass the turn on when the cards do not match. Keeping these rules in mind uses memory and attention too. For many three- and four-year-olds, this part can be harder than remembering where the cards are.

What age can kids start?

Research does not set an age. What follows is a rough guide.

With fewer cards and simpler rules, children can play from around age 3. Showing two or three pairs face up and then turning them over is something many three-year-olds enjoy. Laying out all 52 cards of a full deck can wait until elementary school.

What matters more than age is where your child is getting stuck right now. Is it remembering the pictures, waiting for a turn, or forgetting to turn cards back over? It works well to simplify only the part that is getting in the way.

How to simplify the rules

Use fewer cards. Two or three pairs, four to six cards, is plenty to start. Once your child can clear them easily, add one pair at a time.

Show them face up first. Lay all the cards out face up, say together “the apple is here, the car is here”, then turn them over. The time for remembering becomes clear, and so does what the child is supposed to do.

Use a single row. A single row is easier to remember than a grid. Move to two rows, then three, as your child gets used to it.

Use pictures that look clearly different. The numbers and suits on playing cards look alike to young children. Cards with pictures that differ at a glance, such as animals or vehicles, make a better start.

Don’t worry about turns. At first it is fine for the child to play alone until every pair is found. Bring in taking turns once they understand the game.

Find all the pairs together. Instead of winning and losing, the family can work together to find every pair and count how many turns it took.

Give the adult a handicap. If you do play against each other, the adult can turn over only one card per turn, for example, so the child has more chances to win.

How to handle a child who cries after losing is a longer topic and I leave it out here, but playing together and giving the adult a handicap can help with that too.

Paper cards and apps

The good things about paper cards are that the child turns them over with their own hands, you can change how many there are and how they are laid out, and you play face to face. Most of the ideas above are easier with paper cards.

The good things about an app are that there is nothing to lay out or put away, a child can play alone, and some apps change the number of cards to match how the child is doing.

One way to divide it: paper cards for family play, an app for a short game on their own. I wrote about house rules for apps in Tablet Rules for Preschoolers. Either way, keep each game short. How long young children tend to focus is in How Long Can Preschoolers Focus?.

What BrainDojo Kids offers

BrainDojo Kids is an iPhone and iPad app for children aged 3 to 6 that I make. Its training games include several memory games.

Number Card Memory is Concentration with number cards: find the cards with the same number, two at a time. It starts with four cards, two pairs. When the child matches them well, the next game has more cards, and when it was hard, it has fewer. At most there are 30 cards. It is the “fewer cards, then add a few at a time” idea above, done by the app. It appears when the player’s age is set to 5 or older.

Pair Up is a game of finding matching picture cards, with 20 picture cards, 10 pairs. It appears from age 4. If 20 cards feel like too many for a three- or four-year-old, one option is to start with a few paper cards and move to the app once they are used to the game.

In Number Place Memory, the child looks at numbers on a grid for five seconds, then writes by hand the number that was in the cell now showing a question mark. The grid grows with each correct answer. For four-year-olds there is Easy Number Place Memory, which starts with a smaller grid.

In Sugoroku Together, the family board game, one of the mini games is Pair Memory Battle. Players take turns turning over two cards to find matching pictures, and a player who finds a pair goes again, as in ordinary Concentration. It is also practice in waiting for your turn.

The three daily games in Today’s Training, the four Recommended games and Sugoroku Together are free, and every other game can be tried once. A Premium subscription (monthly or yearly) opens all courses and games. In the parent settings there is a daily time limit, on by default at 10 minutes. There are no ads and no account to create. Getting Started with BrainDojo Kids covers the first session.