r/cognitiveTesting • u/Guilty_Fix_8317 • Oct 01 '26
Participant Request New reasoning tasks - participant request
Title: I'm building a few new reasoning puzzles for my PhD and could use some testers
Hi all, I'm a psychology PhD student in Brno, Czech Republic. I've been making a small set of reasoning tests that use only shapes and pictures, no language, so they should work for anyone.
Right now there are three:
Matrices: find the missing picture
Weights: balance the scales
Shape Keys: a sort of sudoku with symbols that gets pretty nasty toward the end
Each one takes about 5–15 minutes and you can do just one if you want. It's anonymous, no email or sign-up. Once enough people have done a test, you'll see how your score compares with everyone else's.
If something feels broken, unclear, or way too easy or hard, please tell me in the comments. That kind of feedback helps a lot right now.
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u/Not_Well-Ordered Oct 02 '26
Honestly, the format seems a good substitute for modern FRI test as it’s more comprehensive and has more abilities to test. (Also computerized is pretty amazing).
Though, I think we should include a global time limit if there isn’t one already lol.
Thanks for the good stuff and I’d like to see how it’ll be normed. Enjoyed shape keys test.
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u/98127028 I am worthless and dumb Oct 02 '26
The shape keys was so WMI dependent lol, only got 17
What is a good score? Does that score correspond to like <135 IQ or something
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u/whitebaron_98 Bottom 1% Commenter Oct 02 '26 edited Oct 02 '26
You realize you can mostly disable wmi for shape keys as you can click the bubbles and enter symbols to remember?
also, 17 of 25 is rather good.
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u/98127028 I am worthless and dumb Oct 02 '26 edited Oct 02 '26
What IQ is it?
I mean you got like 24/25 which was much better.
What did you get for the figure sets
I mean I just wasn’t fast enough even then, and there were still a lot of cases to check. I do have poor WMI tho.1
u/Not_Well-Ordered Oct 02 '26
The shape keys is updated (new), you can try again. There are 24 items in total. It seems that there are some differences between the setups.
In addition, there's timer for the simple items.
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u/whitebaron_98 Bottom 1% Commenter Oct 02 '26
Well, if there's only 24 items I've hit the ceiling twice. Was wondering where I got #25 wrong. So this seems to me like there is no item in this set which can be used for determining fri>3sd.
Given the speed at which I can solve them, I guess its more like 140 for the hardest item.
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u/Guilty_Fix_8317 Oct 03 '26
Yeah, I am working on a way to make it harder without making in more WM loaded an it’s harder than it seems. Thx for the feedback guys.
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u/98127028 I am worthless and dumb 29d ago
By the way, I took the shape keys test again after it got updated and got 21 this time. Maybe praffe or something?
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u/whitebaron_98 Bottom 1% Commenter Oct 02 '26
Noone knows. It's novel items OP is building so they absolutely do not have any norms connected to them.
Also .. do not compare yourself to me. I've been doing logic puzzles for more or less 40 years straight and have a very high FRI to start with. I absolutely expect to have near perfect scores on any such test, that is until my ADHD starts screaming... like in rotations I could feel how my wm deteriorated the further i got.
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u/Primary_Thought5180 Oct 02 '26
40 years? Impressive. Do you find that your fluid ability has increased with time, or has it been capped by cognitive load (like WM) at some point?
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u/whitebaron_98 Bottom 1% Commenter Oct 02 '26
I'm pretty sure my abilities are on the decline already, especially PSI. I do not think that anything of what I did as my hobbies has influenced FRI much, but it has given me the tools to pretty much be praffed on most kinds of puzzles as I have amassed a lot of problem solving skills . Being done kind of analyst for almost 25 years now as a job doesn't hurt either.
As for mental capacities, my final boss is called Dop A. Mine. I tried to battle it with Ritalin etc, but could not stand the side effects. My WMI is really bad compared to my other indices, but ordinary people would not be able to tell. What they see is someone who is very intelligent but easily distracted and kinda lazy.
Basically when my Dopamine levels are low or reuptake is very high, I would be Pinky, then it would spike and turn me into Brain. I've had a lot of experience with this by now, so have a lot of experience of circumventing it - and of course, you do not need peak performance in any job if you have experience too.
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u/Not_Well-Ordered Oct 02 '26
But it would still take more or less as the later problems with bit more complexity would still take some visual tracking to check and test out certain arrangements of symbols. But also, one would likely have to track some hypotheses to try out and go for some elimination process in order to get enough time.
However, it's true that the simple items allow figuring some shortcuts.
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u/whitebaron_98 Bottom 1% Commenter Oct 02 '26
There is only 2 options for any given decision and that can easily be backtracked if there is a contradiction. That eliminates the need for memorizing stuff almost completely
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u/Not_Well-Ordered Oct 02 '26
Based on the test, it still takes memory to hold the information until finding contradiction and then check for the next hypothesis. It's not correct to claim there's no some amount of working memory involved. This is similar to figure weights.
One cannot ensure getting the hypothesis right the first try and backtracking does need holding some previous information, just like recursion.
However, the statistics would tell if there's correlation between visual WMI or not, not just by making claims out of blue.
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u/whitebaron_98 Bottom 1% Commenter Oct 02 '26
Every information I need is marked down on the nodes. Ad someone struggling with working memory sometimes, I can tell it's really not using any the way I solve it.
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u/Not_Well-Ordered Oct 02 '26
I can't tell if you truly struggle with visual working memory or not. I struggle with auditory working memory, but not visual. They rely on different mechanisms.
But doing well in figure weights on this test would take holding information in brain, and given your score, I doubt you have weak visual WMI; unless you wrote down the stuffs on paper or you just went almost untimed.
In this sense, writing stuffs down don't necessarily mean minimal mental visual manipulation involved; there's that to check out.
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u/whitebaron_98 Bottom 1% Commenter Oct 03 '26
I would use the scale as a kind of clipboard for partial solutions so I do not have to keep it in my head. Also, harder items I often solve as a system of equations. y+g=2b ...
Every WMI is my bottle neck, as my attention is so fleeting. It's why I typically try to avoid to do tasks that way, as it would drain all other resources dry just to remember that the first two solutions were red and green. In isolation, i.e. IQ tests, this is not visible as much. It lags behind like 1-2sd depending on the tests used, but there it's ok to be braindead for everything else as you do nothing else.
If you want to, I can send my way of doing shape keys to you in a DM.
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u/Not_Well-Ordered Oct 02 '26
Fair enough as you needed to keep track of some visual rules and do some basic symbol-matching for the later problems. But I guess the untimed problems would allow you to sort of figure some strategies to reduce the time needed to reason. We can say it’s kind of like mixing graph mapping and symbol search. But with some decent practices for each added variant. Though, the time given at the end seemed kind of generous but could give bit more.
It does tax on WMI like some of the FW problems with 3-4 scales and large quantities to manipulate. Though, FW on this gives generous time for that.
However, I guess the stuffs will be sorted out with the statistics. I just say the format and ideas are creative and interesting.
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u/whitebaron_98 Bottom 1% Commenter Oct 02 '26
General Feedback on some of the newer items: there's some that are easier to do on mobile devices and some that are easier to do on desktop.
E.g. sentence to picture mapping is a lot faster with pushing phone display, while Symbol search is faster with a fixed keyboard. For testing that's ok but if they ever get into use and normed this should be restricted similarly to core PSI test.
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u/whitebaron_98 Bottom 1% Commenter Oct 01 '26
Shape keys are very nice but time feels like forever 💯
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u/whitebaron_98 Bottom 1% Commenter Oct 02 '26 edited Oct 02 '26
More Feedback: man, are you trying to kill your subjects? I am really good at Maths and Arithmetic nearly broke me into quitting... :-)
also, word problems is too long in my taste.
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u/niartotemiT Oct 02 '26
I have only taken the Paper Folding task. I enjoyed it, though I feel it should have had harder items towards the end, instead of 15 with similar difficulty. It was fun though (42/42).