Sunday, 20 March 2016

What makes problems difficult?





Compare this with the forced expiratory volume test.






Rules for figure test






Rules and parameters Table 2



Rules and difficulty








Take a closer look at the paper here:


  1. Psychology of worker/semi-slaves* all the time,

    just do not see because you don't want.


  3. "A 30-itemed Test of Figural Analogies was administered": God, that must be boring to do. How does anyone retain the interest to bother finishing it?

  4. Seems there are three types of ADHD

    first type, the classical: combo mental+physical hyperactivity und attention deficit,

    second type, the potential sportsman: physical hyperactivity und attention deficit,

    third type, the potential creative genius: (only) mental hyperactivity und attention deficit.

    mental hyperactivity is not exactly the same than neuroticism because neuroticism tend to imply in higher density of negative thinking while mental hyperactivity would be more heterogeneous, with both, highly density of positive, neutral and negative thinkings.

    or just other bullshit...

    1. For ADHD there should not be much biological difference between those born in August and September. Yet see the graph in

      "ADHD Is Vastly Overdiagnosed, And Most Children Are Just Immature Say Scientists"

    2. The fact that there is a overdiagnosis don't mean that don't exist adhd.

      You can have a immature child who manipulate others to no have responsibility about their attitudes AND without any attention déficit ( i mean, above average) and you can have a child (or adolescent or adult) who are immature and really distracted.

      Other very pertinent question is: what type of attention deficit we are talking about**

      empathetic attention deficit many times result in anti-social personality OR in pseudo-anti social personality (combo: stupidity + subconscious selfish behavior, we have two types of assholes: the very conscious of their attitudes and those who are very perceptively dumb to understand and weight their own attitudes).

      in my case, i have mundane attention deficit, what i want to say, i no have any strong motivation to internalize well technical activities that most ordinary people to do naturally.

      Adhd ''don't exist'' technically talking because what we identify as psychological pre-morbid or morbid conditions indeed are intense homogeneity of certain or specific''traits'' or just intensity or lack of it like hyper-activity or even hypo-activity. ''average=normal''

      Many times a lot of people are just disadjusted to certain environment, disadjusted is not exactly the same than ''mentally ill''.

      There are some speculations.

  5. ADHD is just the type who are in the dead end of ''tolerance for school regulaments'' and other ''obligatoriness.

    Adhd is a archaic version of humankind because they (i'm little bit like tha') to do what they want, similar with non-human animals, it's not a offense.

    Domesticated people internalize civic and not-so-civic regulaments while adhd on average, seems, to do what they want to do and specially during the school, in other words, they (und me) are LESS domesticated.

  6. For those interested in Rasch measures, which put item difficulties and test-taker abilities on the same scale, allow all arithmetic operations ( *,/,+,-, rather than at most + and - for IQ)and form the basis for item response theory (IRT) in general, this textbook is the best free online resource that I have found:
    Measurement Essentials

    Here is a practical slideshow walk-through showing how Rasch measures ("W score")were used in the development of the Woodcock-Johnson IQ test:
    Applied Psych Test Design: Part C - Use of Rasch scaling technology . The Stanford-Binet, also published by Riverside uses the same scale ("change-sensitive" score or scale "CSS"), which has as its only arbitrary choice setting the CSS for an average 10-year old equal to 500. Since division is a valid operation on scores on this scale, one can say that in an absolute sense, the average adult with a score of 510 to 515 is only 2 or 3% more intelligent than the average 10 year-old, and less than 10% smarter than the average 5 year old with a score of 470.

    Unfortunately Riverside seems reluctant to publish the average age- vs. CSS or W-score graphs for the full test, let alone for different standard deviations, but slide 19 of the slideshow does just that for the WJ block rotation sub-test, which is likely pretty close to the full-scale results, though likely with smaller variance than the full test. (Assessment Service Bulletin Number 3: Use of the SB5 in the Assessment
    of High Abilities
    , p.11 of the PDF says the top full-scale score observed on the SB5 was 592, whereas the block-rotation subtest (BR) has an adult mean of about 508 and a s.d. of about 8.5, which would put a 592 nearly 10 s.d. out, which is rather unlikely, so the actual s.d. for the full scale must be larger. The distribution is also likely log-normal or otherwise fatter-tailed than normal.) So using BR as a proxy likely understates the differences between subjects on the full test, but even so, the difference between +3s.d. and average adults is larger than between average adults and average 5 year olds. The BR score of a +3 s.d. 5 year old is about the same as a +0.5 s.d. 22 year-old, which would be about what I would expect the typical graduating psychology major to score. There are many other such comparisons; I have enjoyed hours playing with that chart. (I have an improved .png version rescaled in years rather than months, with a background grid, and also a Paint.NET version separated into layers for easier analysis, if anybody wants it.)

    I'd be very interested in finding similar charts for a full-scale test, fluid / crystallized scales or any other sub-tests.

    -EH / savantissimo
    (FYI, Wordpress is acting even more messed-up than usual.)

    1. This is very interesting. If you have links to your calculations, or a summary of the results, I would like to see them to understand the argument further.

    2. I'll post on my long-neglected blog and link as soon as I can.

      There isn't much in the way of interesting calculations - using the graph from slide 19 linked above opened in a paint program (Paint.NET, which is free), I use the line tool to measure distances on the graph. The line tool also shows the angle of the line so you can be sure the distance measured is vertical or horizontal. By measuring the distance between the marks on the vertical scale (labeled 470 and 510, so that distance = 40 CSS points), I find that the marks are 91 pixels apart, so each vertical pixel is 40/91 of a CSS point( ~=0.44 pixels/CSS point). Using the same method, I find (412 horizontal pixels)/(300 months) ~= 1.37 pixels/month ~= 16.5 pixels/year.

      The graph in slide 19 shows the Rasch scores on the block rotation subtest from age 2 to 25 for the average as well as for each standard deviation +/- 3 s.d., so allows comparing the absolute intelligence of people with different ages and z-scores.

      For those who haven't looked at the graph, the average score appears to go up as the logarithm of age, rising quickly at first, then more slowly with greater age. The standard deviations are widely spaced at first, but become tightly spaced by age 9, after which they again diverge, with the upper standard deviations scores rising more rapidly while the lower ones are almost flat.

      The SB5 service bulletin #3 has on page 12 of the PDF a reprint from the SB5 interpretive manual of the average full-scale CSS scores (table 4), which closely matches the average line in slide 19, so the block rotation subtest average scores vs. age should be a reasonable proxy for the full scale, (though as I said the standard deviations on BR are likely somewhat smaller than the FS).

      Using a horizontal straightedge on the graph allows equating a given CSS score to z-scores at different ages. The Mk.I eyeball gives a pretty decent estimate of fractional z-scores falling between the s.d. lines, but one can use the line tool to get better measurements of the z-score that equates to a given CSS at a given age.