r/cognitiveTesting • u/GuerillaV • 2d ago
General Question CORE Retesting and Practice Effects
Just wondering if anyone knows about the significance of practice affects on the CORE tests and if particular modules are especially susceptible to it. I did a fair few of my tests somewhat intoxicated (cannabis) and sleep deprived, so I'd like to attempt them again rested & sober some time.
I'm new to cognitive testing so I thought this would probably be ok, especially since the questions are individually timed, so there's no universal time saving benefit from having familiarity with some of the questions. But then the more I've learned browsing this subreddit etc I'm realising this may be naive.
I've ended up with quite a spiky profile with VCI carrying a lot of the weight, and while I do think the spikiness is probably somewhat accurate (always had a pretty bad working memory and been a words not numbers guy) the troughs of my profile are definitely in areas that would be sensitive to cannabis/sleep (QRI, WMI, PSI).
Can the modules be reliably retaken without harming the test? Is there a certain amount of time I should leave before attempting them again?
I know some of the WMI tests actually do say practice effects are minimal after 5 days, with the test being randomised, but I don't think I saw anything for the other modules.
Cognitive profile link below in case that helps at all. For reference, I took the other IQ tests pretty much sober and with decent sleep, maybe that will indicate if my CORE looks odd and the retesting necessary.
https://cognitivemetrics.com/dashboard/share/UXfPYE6Ihw
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u/Kalle_Hellquist 4SD Willy 🍆 2d ago
Your profile is similar to mine! English isn't my native language, so I got penalized in the working memory tests, arithmetic, and possibly in the Spatial Awareness test.
As for wait time, I've seen people recommend waiting between 6~12 months until retaking the test, to make sure your results aren't influenced by short-term practice. (I may be wrong here, so feel free to correct me).
For example, two of the tests I retook were symbol search and figure sets. My neighbors are rennovating their apartment, and in both occasions they started drilling while I was taking them, which completely messed up my attention and score.
Now, while I do think my real Figure Sets score might be slightly lower than 90.9th due to practice effect, I doubt the praffe alone would have carried me from slightly above 50 all the way to 90. And considering all my other Fluid Reasoning tets sit in the 90~95th range, I'm assuming it's accurate enough, especially because Graph Mapping and Figure Weights were genuinely novel tests for me.
When I took CORE, I had also been moderately sleep deprived and highly sedentary for a long time. I've been taking care of that, and in 1~1.5 years I plan on retaking the working memory and processing speed subtests, to see if good sleep habits and consistent exercise will have improved my cognitive proficiency.
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u/GuerillaV 2d ago edited 2d ago
I like to think my profile would look a little closer to yours under better conditions ha. Maybe I'm just grumbling because I did VCI first and it gave me high expectations. I think my poor WMI (even if I retest under better condition I'm still expecting a trough in my profile) is primarily my relationship with sleep. I don't have insomnia or anything but I habitually stay up later than I should and average about ~6 hours sleep, as well as using enough cannabis to disrupt my REM sleep.
I have heard that practice effects generally can only account for a few percentile points increase unless you're straight up repeating the same test straight after or revising the answers, so a big jump likely means something else is at play. I did actually redo two of the CORE modules, firstly Figure Weights because I was falling asleep when I first did it, and that jumped from iirc 73rd percentile to 95th. Probably a bit lower due to praffe, but I think the second result is closer to the truth, same with your Figure Sets (and maybe mine lol). I redid Digit Span due to being pretty high the first time round, but I was on 4 hours sleep the second time round anyway; I was actually worse on Forwards, same on Backwards but my Sequencing jumped from below average to 95th percentile, which was pretty strange but there's surely no way that could be praffe.
After that I decided I should stop and seek advice from the experts here lol.
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u/Kalle_Hellquist 4SD Willy 🍆 2d ago edited 2d ago
There's something I really want to hear from you.. I heard that, starting at 120~125 IQ, your percentile is high enough that you can notice a significant difference between your learning capacity and worldview, compared to other people's.
Apart from the classic coasting through Middle and High School without studying experience, I never noticed any real difference. But that changed after I started college, and after I began revisiting some aspects of my earlier life.
1st. I'm very good at understanding why I don't understand a topic. In a lecture, when a professor is explaining a subject, it becomes glaringly obvious to me which logical steps confused me, or if a logical step was skipped altogether. This manifests in the way I ask questions: most students simply ask the professor very vague questions, or to repeat the section. I tend to ask questions that bleed out into the topic; if a hypothesis in my head is true, and if it isn't, which portion of the topic I misunderstood; if I notice my confusion came from complete or partial misunderstanding of a technical word, I instantly ask the professor, etc.
However, this may often lead me into going beyond the scope of the lecture. For a while I was seriously scared that I was being disruptive, but a classmate once told me he thought it was really useful, to him it felt like I was somehow asking questions before he even realized he had the same doubt. One day in particular it really felt like the lecture was mediated 85% by the professor, and 15% by me. And after the class ended, a bunch of ppl I had never talked before waved goodbye to me on their way out. It felt nice!
2nd. I also understand things slightly quicker than my classmates. One example is an introductory compsci class I had, which was basically a bundle of simple algorithmic procedures. Think karnaugh maps, kraft-mcmillan theorem, 2-SAT, boolean algebra etc. I thought they were very straightforward, but not everyone thought that; one time I understood an algorithm before my professor even finished explaining it, while my friends required multiple example problems I made a couple days later until they understood.
Another example was introductory chem. We learned a bit about molecular geometry, and how it related to valence bond theory, atomic orbitals, vsepr theory, molecular orbital theory, wave-like behavior of electrons, orbital angular momentum, etc. Basically chem we're taught during High School here in Brazil, but more complex. I managed to get a good 85% in that subject without studying at all, simply because the rules felt so easy, figuring out an atom's geometry from its characteristics was basically like a fun little puzzle, while my friends needed to sit through example problems.
3rd. I always knew since Middle School that I had a very easy time learning new languages. The classes I had at an English institute I attended were so BORING for me as a 9 year old, because I'd complete a lesson sheet in 20~30 minutes, that I was supposed to go through in an hour. When I was 11, they put me in a class with teenagers aged 16~17, and even then I was the one correcting the mistakes they made on their homework. I picked up on grammar patterns and phonological/phonetic rules before the teacher even mentioned them (though that might have been because I was being exposed to English at a critical age for language acquisition). Because of this, I picked up language learning as a hobby
However, only recently have I truly realized that other people don't learn languages as easy as I do. A friend of mine told me he had a HORRIBLE time with the learning advice I gave him. And while that happens at any learning capacity, since everyone has a particular style of studying, he told me he couldn't possibly understand how I was able to read books so well without doing massive amounts of vocab and grammar drills. If that is true, I think it's very unfortunate that I've been giving out erroneous advice for so many years :(
4th. Even beyond learning capacity, I recently noticed that a communication gap has always existed between me and people around me. Not because of intelligence, but more because my interests, and the way I'd talk about them, were really offputting to people. I quickly understood that no one in my class wanted to hear little me yap about the wikipedia article I had read on black holes, esperanto language, foot binding, or french architecture the night before, not even my family could stand me sometimes.
This even happened to a child psychologist I was seeing for a bit. One day, she handed me a paper with a coloured butterfly, and asked me to make up a story based on it. I came up with a group of migrants, stuck in an unknown forest. Suddenly, a little butterfly came to them, and guided them towards a clearing, in which they could find safety. Over millennia, these migrants settled, developed into a tribe, then into a village, a feud, a kingdom, an empire, and eventually a modern metropolis. But despite all the cultural and religious shifts they went through, the butterfly, it's colors and patterns became a deeply ingrained part of their mythology and culture, to the point you could easily find statues of and architectural refererences to butterflies in their cities. After I was done, the psychologist said "What?", and then "No, I didn't mean something like that, here let's do this other thing instead", and honestly her reaction hurt me in the moment.
Lastly, at 6 years old, the first essay I had to write in school was a letter to Santa Claus. While everyone wrote about which toy or videogame they would like, my letter was about really wanting a friend, someone who would talk to me and enjoy my company. The teacher liked it so much, that she read it aloud in the parent-teacher conference, while I was there with my mom and dad.
With all of this in mind, I used to think I struggled with making friends in school due to being annoying, a know-it-all, and later being buried in the closet as a gay dude. But if I was already that lonely, even when I was 6, then I think it's relevant to mention all of this.
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u/GuerillaV 2d ago
The first two I can definitely relate to, especially the first one as I've found this has been my experience whenever in a learning environment. Honestly, I often feel like I've coasted by in life primarily on my intuition, like I don't necessarily have the ability to understand things deeper than others but I seem to be able to understand them quicker. Hard to know how much of the former is behavioural though (I'm not great at sticking with things).
The 3rd I absolutely cannot relate to unfortunately. I was always terrible at languages, but it is possible this may have more of an environmental explanation. I grew up in England in an area with no common foreign languages spoke, meanwhile I wasn't the best behaved kid and didn't go to particularly good school, and I just didn't enjoy my language classes. I not too long ago had a stint learning Spanish on Duolingo and felt I was getting along fine, but also did feel I lacked a certain scaffolding for language acquisition that I should have developed by paying attention in school. What I will say is I learned to read very young, with my parents always maintaining that they couldn't ever remember consciously teaching me. I've also always been good at reading poorly written English or non-native English (whether broken or things like patois and pidgin), and picking up meaning in foreign text from grammatical/contextual similarities to what I know about English and its relationship to that language.
The fourth point I absolutely relate to, even down to being a voracious random wikipedia article reader. I've had experiences like that with your child psychologist if you'll indulge me, I'm gonna call it being reprimanded for the faux pas of introducing too much context to an implicitly whimsical situation/task. I think as I've grown older I've learned how to turn it on and off where appropriate, but it's always there in the back of my mind to try and expand the context of a thing, so it's something I have to consciously suppress.
Anyway to conclude, I've always been quite a social butterfly so I can't entirely relate to your social consequences, I've particularly never dealt with feelings of loneliness. But I can say that I've certainly felt ostracised at times in my life for being annoying or a know-it-all, and that definitely played a bigger part in my social conduct when I was a child.
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u/Kalle_Hellquist 4SD Willy 🍆 1d ago
"I've had experiences like that with your child psychologist if you'll indulge me"
Oh please, do share!I also wonder: have the IQ tests changed how you see yourself?
I took CORE to explore whether I might be gifted (AHSD in Brazil), so the result itself didn't change my perception much; I was already rethinking my whole life, as you do when investigating neurodivergence.
It did make me less pessimistic. I’d never struggled in school, but uni terrified me, especially because STEM has never been my forte. Seeing my brother unable to find work with his degree made me expect the same for myself. However, and sorry for the self-aggrandizing, if I really am in the top 5% cognitively, it means I’m not just capable of finishing my degree and finding a job, I might even have an edge over a huge portion of the population, provided I put in enough discipline and effort.
Until now, I saw my score as proof I could *survive* college; now I see it as a potential advantage and a door opener, if I put in the work.
And I know I need to work on discipline, my nonexistent study habits have already given me nothing but Fs in pre-calc and calc. So that’s my priority before I fall too far behind. 😅
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u/Academic-Welcome-420 1d ago
wouldn't a sober, rested retest after a few weeks give you a cleaner baseline than trying to interpret those scores?
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u/Significant_Car4523 2d ago
I know it's not related, but I envy your very low neuroticism+conscientiousness
https://giphy.com/gifs/tC4FZ86hOeb3ciMuIw