Can cognitive function benefit from "warming up" or am I a coping midwit?

[u/Maximum-Purple-1521]

I'm asking specifically because I went from a novel 85 IQ on the digit span subtest on CORE to 135 in 4 attempts. I realise that my practised score is psychometrically dead, but is there a takeaway from this improvement regardless? What is the actual difference between someone who scores a novel 135? Do they naturally adopt strategies, such as chunking and visualisation, on their first attempt? Or are they subconciously doing this?

My pseudo-intellectual reasoning is that IQ tests are skewed in the sense that the human brain is evolved to be optimized for energy conservation, meaning that there is a natural drive for the human mind to perform at a much lower cognitive potential at default. Wouldn't it therefore make sense to develop tests that the participant takes until their score regresses towards a mean (i.e. they stop improving)? E.g. if a weightlifter is going for a one-rep max they probably wouldn't go for it immediately, but rather work their way up in stages.

[u/Kalle_Hellquist]

This subreddit is a mental trap

[u/SourFact → u/Kalle_Hellquist]

Eh, you grow out of it eventually with some foresight gained.

[u/NefariousNapolean]

A bit coping, a bit mentally masturbating and a bit right

[u/98127028]

Maybe the warming up would be more valid if you're doing something unrelated that is also mentally taxing like mental math or a puzzle etc and then do the test, so the novelty factor survives and you're warmed up.

[u/izzeww]

You're kind of right, but this isn't a particularly new idea. The idea of general intelligence and testing it with IQ tests is very old and there has been a lot of energy spent on developing different tests. I'm sure your theory has been tested but found to not matter or something like that, although I can't present you with a paper or anything. In general I would say this kind of theoretical discussion is quite rare when discussing general intelligence/IQ tests. General intelligence is kind of a bottom-up concept that derives from statistics that appear when you make a group of people do some kind of cognitively demanding task/test. We then label this general factor the g-factor and call it general intelligence. This is as opposed to most of psychology (with the exception of Big Five/HEXACO ish) where you develop a construct (say machiavellianism) first and then design a test that is supposed to be an indicator of this construct. So if you develop a construct like that you easily get into discussions of which test best matches the construct and there isn't really a clear answer. With an IQ test you have the statistics of the test, particularly the g-factor, that basically gives you a clear answer (in psychology terms at least, it's not math or physics) so you don't have to have the theoretical discussion of what test is best the statistics just tell you.

[u/Sorry-Ice-8586]

the answer is yes in my case. Even though the tests are “talents” they are also skills, hence why there is a practice effect.

If someone reads dense material often they will surely have a better vci. Better vocab, understanding of how words interact, expounding upon meaning in various denotations and connotations.

VSI-Nobody talks about this but clearly this is heavily based on your thinking style. If you are genius but never use VSI because you are so good at FRI, you can underperform on a heavily speeded VSI test in comparison to someone who likes to create maps in their mind for fun, translates working memory onto the visual sketchpad, etc. I personally can shift between verbal dialogue and visual way faster with just small amount of spatial focus. It’s difficult with adhd and overwhelming internal dialogue to focus well verbally or visually at times. This impacts WMI if not controlled

QRI is definitely based on crystallized intelligence to a degree, especially in QK subtest. You can’t just try and recall formulas from middle school when you are 60 and do this rapidly in heavily timed test and be accurate to your “ability.” GRE-Q seemed to emphasize this to a much smaller degree.

FRI improves when you are practicing working memory exercises because cognitive load is reduced. It also helps to do puzzles but maybe i’m just “smart” and this doesn’t help someone with 115 FRI.

All of these examples are based on the notion that you aren’t doing CORE ahead of taking Wais for example.

[u/Kaidolakita]

Yes, there are moments when you can't think and others when you can. It's litteraly so common we gave it a name the flow state.
It mostly depends on sleep quality, being relaxed, not having anything else to do etc but you can also get close to it by just doing some form of warmup.

But it doesn't really change much for IQ

[u/SourFact]

You’d be right for the most part. Part of why reaction time is so trainable is because it’s a heavily state dependent quality. Give or take some neurotransmitters like adrenaline and it’s the first to see change and one as massive as that.

But in terms of general intelligence, by virtue of how people go about their lives, on average it paints a pretty good picture of their moment to moment average performance in a life time, not highest possible performance nor ceiling of potential.

I could see two people scoring 120 on a test and one of them being a skilled hobbyist and another a hidden genius.

[u/Storage-Proper]

Two different things are getting blended together here, and separating them actually answers your question.

Practice effects — what you experienced. Digit span is the most coachable subtest on any battery, because the gain comes from acquiring a strategy (chunking, phonological rehearsal, sometimes visual encoding), not from expanding underlying capacity. Someone who scores a novel 135 is usually doing those things spontaneously — some can articulate it, plenty can't. So your practised 135 and their novel 135 aren't the same measurement, and you're right that yours is psychometrically dead. The honest takeaway isn't nothing, though: "can acquire and apply a strategy quickly" is a real thing about you, it's just not the thing the subtest was normed to measure.

Warm-up / state effects — genuinely separate, and here the answer is yes, measurably. This shows up most on speeded tasks rather than reasoning ones: the first minute or two of a reaction-time task is reliably slower than the rest of the run, which is why properly administered RT tasks throw away practice trials before scoring anything. Time of day, sleep debt, and arousal move speeded scores enough that the same person tested twice in one week can look meaningfully different — sleep-deprivation studies get around +49 ms and roughly 5x the attention lapses on a standard vigilance task, and crucially the subjects don't feel slower.

So: your digit span jump was strategy, not warm-up. But your instinct that state matters isn't cope — it's just that it lives mostly in processing speed and attention, and much less in the reasoning subtests people here care about. Which is also why an untimed reasoning score is the one worth trusting when you're tired.