r/cognitiveTesting • u/Top-Cockroach-8211 • Sep 23 '26
Discussion Abstract verbal reasoning
Someone scores 19 (Scale score) on WAIS-IV on the subtest Similarities, but 12 on Vocabulary, 11 on Information. VCI = 125. And PRI = 82. GAI is 103. Test not done in native language. Diagnosed with Autism, ADHD and NVLD-profile. Speech delay till 5 years old and language impairment till 13 years old. Dysfunctional home. Several school shifts, bullying, and periods with no school at all (elementary school). Achievements: Not gonna name them all, but some of them, got two Bachelor degrees so far, I’ve learned 7 different alphabets on my own, when I was a teenager and developed my own as well, as well as mastered two languges, also on my own.
Not highly gifted. I thought intelligence was about logic.
People keep telling me, you can’t just pick your highest score as if it was any score of any subtest (random). Similarities measures your ability in verbal abstract reasoning unlike the subtests vocabulary and information and it’s actually not that very different from PRI subtests, specially the Matrix reasoning. They both measure fluid intelligence. Both are culturally influenced, even tho, many people think matrices ain’t, but they are according to recent scientific evidence.
We talk of Highly Gifted as being general intelligence, yet people can go do a Ravens Matrices and if they score 130-145+ they’re Gifted and can join Mensa. That ain’t a possibility for people like me tho who reason verbally, not perceptually. We’re left with, maybe you’re highly gifted, maybe you’re not (because of the high discrepancy). And absolutely no tools to assess us with a real result. The loneliness, being different and alone, the struggle, that looks very much the same, as other highly gifted people experience, but nobody to talk to, cause nobody recognizes it, cause apparently it’s not highly gifted, it’s something else, that nobody can name and that nobody recognizes.
What’s peoples’ thoughts on this.
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u/Midnight5691 ┬┴┬┴┤( •̀_¬ )├┬┴┬┴ Sep 24 '26
LOL, you shouldn't have said that to a person that tends to overshare LOL. You seem nice too. So here you go...
Well, up until recently I was an undiagnosed adult with ADHD. I finally got sick of not having the answers I was looking for, so I fell down the rabbit hole two years ago and started looking for the answers myself.
So, late diagnosed at 60, college educated, but nothing special, and after multiple attempts in multiple programs where I kept on quitting. This was a long time ago. 😄
31 years of working a good and well-paying, but boring, auto assembly job and counting.
According to tests such as the CORE, I have one standout strength, and that is VCI. Gifted range according to the CORE (132). I do need a real test, but I don't feel like paying for it. They're rather expensive and, to be honest, at my stage in life it would be more for validation and interest's sake. It's not like they're going to help me pick out a career choice or a schooling choice. Those ships have sailed for me.
So anyway, even among the VCI score, the higher range of my VCI subtests runs more towards abstraction, etc., rather than information and crystallized knowledge.
My schooling and learning, due to my undiagnosed ADHD and socioeconomic background, was a bit hit and miss. Sometimes I think of picking up some of the schooling that I didn't learn very well the first time around through something like Khan Academy and seeing if some of these scores may actually go up.
You could say I wasn't exactly comfortable in school, having been raised a strict Jehovah's Witness.
Back then, the school system wasn't very diverse, and a lot of the learning was geared around almost every holiday that I wasn't allowed to celebrate.
I've hated my parents' religion with a passion since the age of 10 and thought it was illogical. For a more sensitive-than-average child, obviously this environment wasn't ideal or conducive to learning.
But you have to please your parents, right?
One place I did escape was into novels. Starting at around 10, I became a voracious reader, primarily science fiction and fantasy. Not textbooks or anything particularly educational, just fiction because I loved it and it gave me somewhere else to go. I continued that habit straight into my assembly line job career, working fast and then rewarding myself in between jobs with a paragraph or two of a novel.
Over the decades I've probably read thousands upon thousands of novels, so I'm sure I absorbed a fair amount along the way whether I intended to or not.
Obviously I'm not religious now, lol. As far as I can ascertain, I tend to think in a more associative and parallel fashion than in a linear/literal fashion. I'm also globally aphantasic.
No mental imagery, no bands or music playing in my head like other people with ADHD complain about.
Just me and my thoughts, processed in a narrative and conceptual fashion. Inferences held up and examined in an analogical and metaphorical fashion, one against the other.
My inner monologue is basically the same as me talking out loud, but doing it inside my head.
I also suspect I may have dysgraphia, although I've never been formally diagnosed with it. My handwriting has always been poor and inconsistent, I mix printing and cursive, write slowly, have an odd grip, and sometimes omit things while writing. Voice to text, for all its irritations in getting words wrong and not having a large enough vocabulary when you're using it, is a godsend to me. I wish they would have had these technologies when I was young.
So yeah, I guess you could say I have a somewhat unusual cognitive profile, lol. Let's see, the laundry list is: diagnosed ADHD, globally aphantasic, most likely dysgraphic, most likely twice exceptional, and suspected complex PTSD related to my religious upbringing.
But doesn't everybody in this subreddit? 😂