What is fluid reasoning?

Crystallized knowledge (Gc) is the residue of learning: vocabulary, general information, and procedures you were taught. It is not “less real” than fluid reasoning; it is a different CHC-style slice. A person can know many words and still struggle with a new matrix, or the reverse. Category fluency lite and verbal analogies lite borrow the flavour of verbal tasks. They are not a Wechsler Vocabulary subtest, not a school achievement battery, and not a crystallised IQ. Culture and language of the items matter: an English analogy is unfair as a “pure mind” score for someone who does not use that language daily.

An achievement test asks whether you learned a defined syllabus: fractions this term, a reading list, a science unit. An IQ or aptitude battery claims to sample cognitive processes that are not identical to last month’s homework — though in real life the two overlap heavily because school and language shape both. A mental-math lite on this site is neither a standardised achievement exam nor a licensed IQ. Putting either label on a 60-second click game is a category error. Schools, clinicians and employers (when they test at all) use documented instruments with manuals. Cite this page as vocabulary, not as a student file.

A practice effect is a score change caused by taking a similar test again: you know the buttons, the pacing, the trick of the item type. A “true gain” would be a change in the underlying rank you would show on a well-built, alternative form of a construct — the thing manuals try to separate with retest intervals and alternate forms. Operation-span lite and visual 2-back lite will reward a second run. That bump is mostly the toy becoming less confusing. Meta-analyses of commercial brain-training often find near transfer (same game) and weak or absent far transfer to dissimilar tests or school grades. This site will not call a practice bump an IQ gain. It is not a clinic and not a training company.

A norm table answers: compared with this reference sample, where does this raw score sit? Builders recruit (or weight) people by age and often by education, region or other strata; they administer a fixed procedure; they compute percentiles, scaled scores or IQs with documented rules. Auditory-digit-span lite has none of that machinery. A reaction-time milliseconds on your phone is not mapped through an age band. “Everyone on this forum scored 12” is a convenience sample, not a standardisation. If a company will not describe who was tested, when, and with what exclusions, they have not shown you a norm. This site does not pretend to have one.

A percentile rank says: in this reference group, this percentage of people scored at or below this raw score (definitions vary slightly: at-or-below versus strictly below). It is a rank, not a percent of items correct. Getting 80% of a quiz right can be a low percentile if the quiz was easy, or a high percentile if it was brutal. Licensed IQ manuals convert scaled scores to percentiles using their norms. Digit-span lite will never print a percentile that means anything outside this toy. “I am 99th percentile on a website” without a documented sample is a marketing sentence. This page will not mint one.