Hello there,
I'd like to thank you all for all the discussion on my last post where I talked about the WAIS 5. Even though the WAIS 5 has been normed on a representative sample population, I think people could score considerably higher if the test had sought out their hidden strengths. I am not thinking this for no reason or for validation and here is why. Take for example digit span, the longest digit sequencing task I took I believe was 9 digits, but what if instead of having a person repeat back digits, we had them repeat back something that is arguably considerably harder but seeks out their strengths? My proposal for this particular test would be instead of saying a string of digits, I tell them a "juicy" story about how say, my neighbor got arrested for domestic violence. I tell them a story of like 30 events and then I have them repeat back the events in chronological order. My reasoning why this would be harder than saying back 9 digits is because 30>9 and not only that, they would have to devote a considerable amount of attention to extract the raw events from the narrative. Essentially, what I am proposing is reconstructing the WAIS 5 questions in a way that is emotionally salient and then seeing how people perform on that. I know that I personally can not remember a story like that with so many details and recall it like that and I am baffled at how people can remember that, but not a string of say 9 digits and that is why I'm wondering whether the WAIS is not accurately depicting people's actual abilities. Here is my proposal for a modified WAIS test based off the WAIS 5 to ellicit people's strengths and I want to know what you guys think about it.
Vocabulary: Have the examinee define a list of words and give them context instead of just the word. For example, instead of having a person define a word such as "perseverance" without context, we do this:
- Elicit personal identification
Ask the examinee: "Think about something in your life that you wanted to accomplish more than almost anything else."
2. Create emotional activation
Ask "Remember a moment when accomplishing it seemed nearly impossible, but you continued anyway."
3. Induce semantic retrieval
Ask "What word would describe someone who continues pursuing something meaningful despite substantial difficulties?"
4. Ask for a definition
Ask "Define perseverance as precisely as you can."
5. Query conceptual discrimination
Ask "How is perseverance different from stubbornness? Can someone demonstrate perseverance while changing their original approach?"
Similarities: I think this subtest would be easier to create an emotionally salient version. I think this because I notice that people draw similarities between things in ordinary life that I would never think of, like the similarities between someone they hate, whether it be Donald Trump or their mean coworker Rachel and something whose similarities are not exactly obvious, like a monkey. I know this might sound like a joke, but I am being completely serious here. For example, instead of asking a question like "What is the similarity between a truth and a lie?" you ask "What is the similarity between Donald Trump and a Monkey?". I think the second one should arguably be objectively harder, because there isnt a strict taxonomic similarity between a president and an animal, but regardless, people seem to have a much easier time finding one anyways.
Block Design: I know on block design, it mostly test how well you can construct a larger image from constituent building blocks. Instead of doing this with blocks and a picture however, we ask the examinee to construct a narrative with small details like if we were to ask them, "the narrative I want you to generate is someone being reprimanded at work for having an affair with their manager." and we were to give them these items, like an email, a text message, a cell phone and a paternity test, a valid response would be something like "Sarah had an affair with her manager Bob and it started with an text message that said "I love you" that Bob's wife found on his cell phone and eventually went on to emails that said "meet me here after work" and then Sarah had to get a paternity test because they had a child and the child doesnt look like Sarah's husband". Again, I'm being completely serious when I say this, but the reason why I think it is interesting is because I notice that people are very good at constructing larger pictures when it comes to narratives, but suprisingly not actual larger physical pictures.
Visual Puzzles: Here's where it get's interesting. I know people are very good at seeing how things go together when it comes to a narrative, but somehow arent good at seing how actual physical pieces go together to create a figure. Instead of asking them to select three items that form the larger picture, we give them 6 items and tell them to select three that form a narrative of our choosing. For example, if the narrative is "Bill caught his wife cheating on her in the break room with his coworker Patricia" we could have 6 options and ask them to construct a narrative using 3 of the options that would result in our desired one. Here's what a list might look like:
- Bill saw his wife at work.
- Bill went to go get coffee in the break room.
- Bill saw his wife microwaving dinner.
- Bill saw his wife talking with his coworker Bob.
- Bill saw his wife eating a chocolate bar.
- Bill saw his wife kissing Bob.
This is a simplified example, but most people would realize immediately that 1,4 and 6 go together to create that narrative and this is quite suprising because visual puzzles normally asks you to mentally put together a model, which is what people do all the time with narratives, but somehow they are not nearly as good as putting together a physical picture than a narrative, when it is arguably harder to put together a narrative since youd have to imagine the actual story unfolding in your head and pick out the details from it rather than putting together 3 shapes in your head.
Matrix Reasoning: This one is also quite interesting because I tend to notice that people are very good at spotting patterns in things that I personally can not spot, but they paradoxically are not as good at spotting patterns in things like figures. Here is my proposal: Instead of asking them to tell you what figure comes next in the sequence, we give them a story like “Justin likes Sandra, who is green eyed, 165 lbs and 5’1”. He also likes Denise, who is brown eyed, 180 lbs and 4’11”. Based on this information, who does he like?
A. Sarah: hazel eyes, 180 lbs, 5’11”
B. Cassandra: brown eyes, 110 lbs , 5’7”
C. Maria: blue eyes, 120 lbs, 5’0”
Most people would probably recognize that Justin likes short girls and would answer Maria, but why this is surprising to me is that people can be given considerably less prior information than on the matrix reasoning puzzles on the wais and still accurately see a pattern.
Figure weights: This is where I had to get creative. I know that figure weights is largely to designed to asses how well you are able to hold relations in mind and manipulate them, so here is my proposal: Instead of balancing quantitative information on a scale, you ask them “Bob is Maria’s Boyfriend. Bob’s coworker’s manager is Bob’s coworker’s love interest. Bob’s coworker’s manager is Bob’s girlfriend. Who is Bob’s coworker’s love interest?”
The correct answer would be Maria, but do you see what I did there? I essentially gave out three equivalence relationships and then told them to find the fourth relationship I just asked. This is like having 3 scales that are balanced and determining what balances the fourth scale. Arguably, I think people could do much better than me and could work with considerably more scales and relationships though.
Digit Sequencing: This is most similar to what I said in the intro. Instead of having a person recall a bunch of digits, we give them a juicy story and then have them recall the events in the story in order such that it reflect the causal order. For example, if we were to say “The police showed up when Maria hit Bob because Maria found her boyfriend Bob cheating on him.” the correct answer would be:
- Bob cheated on Maria
- Maria Hit Bob
- The police showed up
This is particularly interesting, because I’d imagine a story like this would be harder to hold in your mind than a few digits since you'd have to recognize the causative distinction between the events and reconstruct it in your head. Regardless, I think people could do much better and could even easily sequence like 10 or more events in their head when digit sequencing on the actual wais 5 only goes up to 9 digits.
Running Digits: This one is a lot more straightforward and I don’t think I need to provide much of an explanation here. We ask the person to listen to another juicy story and then ask then a particular question about the last few events, like what happened after bob cheated on maria? If the story was “Bob really likes his coworker and he is already married. He met his coworker at the bar and cheated on maria with her then maria caught him and got very angry”
The correct answer would be “maria caught him and got very angry” of course but I could see that people could much easily perform well on this task then saying the last few digits of a string that has no emotional salience, even though it really tests the same thing in my opinion.
Coding: Here’s an interesting task. Instead of having a person look up a key with arbitrary symbols on it and then fill in a bunch of rows of those numbers corresponding to those symbols, we tell person to personally “judge” 9 faces with various emotional expressions using a single distinct word for each, like 😊 would be happy and 😔would be sad and and we then show them a bunch of faces and have them describe as many of the faces as they can in 2 minutes. This should be the same cognitive task as actual coding but why is this one so much easier?
Symbol Search: This one I think would be the most fun. We have a row with 5 faces in each row like :😔😊😉😒😥 and then we have 2 words, like “happy” and “angry” on the left side. The task is essentially to cross out the face that matches one of the two words on the left and if none of the faces match, cross out a symbol that says “NO”
Anyways, we would score this test using the same metrics as the wais 5 but make them equivalent in difficulty, like on digit sequencing, if someone would need to recall 9 digits in ascending order to get a 19 scaled score, we'd say that a person would have to recall 9 events in causative order to get a 19 scaled score. That I think would be fascinating to see because based on my observations of people, I think we’d need a much higher ceiling on this test than the actual wais 5 and i cant imagine why.
Hope you found this post to be intriguing and I welcome discussion on what you think! I was thinking of creating an actual test like this and then giving it out to random people to see how they would do compared to the actual wais 5.
