Working Memory and Fluid Reasoning: Same or Different?

In 1990, researchers Patrick Kyllonen and Raymond Christal found a striking

correlation.

They gave large groups of American Air Force recruits various tests of working
memory, in which participants performed simple operations on a single letter. For
instance, in the alphabet recoding task, the computer briefly displayed three
letters:

H, N, C

Followed by an instruction, such as:

Add 4

In which the answer would be:

L, R, G

Of course, adding four letters is a piece of cake. The difficult part is remembering the
letter while performing the next mental operation, and holding both of those in mind
while operating on the third. This can get increasingly difficult with more complex
instructions and more letters to transform in your head.

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Working Memory and Fluid Reasoning: Same or Different?

Across four different studies, they found extremely high correlationsranging from .
80 to .90 between their measures of working memory and various measures of
reasoning. In fact, the correlations were so high they titled their paper: Reasoning
ability is (little more than) working memory capacity?!

Many studies since then have confirmed that working memory is an important
contributor to fluid reasoning. Out of all the cognitive abilities ever measured by
intelligence researchers, fluid reasoning is the most general cognitive ability of them
all, explaining the most amount of variance in all of the other cognitive abilities. The
ability to infer relations and spot patterns on problems that draw on minimal prior
knowledge and expertise plays a role in varying degrees across virtually all areas
of human intellectual functioning.

But just how strong is the relationship between working memory and fluid
reasoning? As is often the case with science, the strength of the correlation between
working memory and fluid reasoning has been all over the map, making the true
relationship between working memory and fluid reasoning difficult to determine.

There are many reasons for the inconsistencies. Different studies include a different
selection of tests, a different number of tests, and a different range of cognitive
abilities among the participants. These sort of methodological details matter.

A new study suggests an additional factor at play: the timing of the tests. Adam
Chuderski reviewed 26 studies that administered measures of working memory and
the Ravens Progressive Matrices test, which is the most widely used measure of fluid
reasoning.*

On each Ravens question, you are presented with a 33 matrix and you have to
identify the missing piece that completes the pattern:

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Working Memory and Fluid Reasoning: Same or Different?

What does it take to do well on this test? It turns out there are only a handful of rules
required to solve all the items on this test. The easier problems require you to apply a
single rule such as adding or subtracting a single attribute (such as a line). But the
harder ones require combining multiple rules, and juggling multiple attributes (such
as shapes, sizes, and colors). The difficulty in solving the Ravens items is that you
have to sort out the relevant attributes from the irrelevant attributes and hold the
rules in your mind while testing them. And when some rules dont work out, you
have to know when to stop going down that path and start over. Since this task
requires the ability to discover the abstract relations among novel stimuli, it is a
good measure of nonverbal fluid reasoning.

Chuderski found that the studies that increased the time pressure of the Ravens test
significantly increased the correlation between working memory and fluid reasoning.
In other words, when people were given more time to reason, working memory
capacity wasnt as strong a contributor to fluid reasoning.

He found this finding intriguing, so across two studies, he decided to dig deeper.

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Working Memory and Fluid Reasoning: Same or Different?

In his first study, he administered multiple tests of working memory and fluid
reasoning to 1,377 people with an age range of 15-46. Using a statistical technique
called confirmatory factor analysis, he confirmed that the time pressure of the fluid
reasoning tests impact the strength of the correlation between working memory and
fluid reasoning.

In the case of the highly speeded group (20 minutes), working memory explained
all of the variance in fluid reasoning, whereas in the unspeeded group (60
minutes), working memory accounted for only 38% of the variance in fluid
reasoning:

Chuderski replicated this finding in a second study, finding that under no time
pressure during fluid reasoning, working memory only explained about a third of the
differences in reasoning performance. Also, he found that a measure of relational
learning the ability to learn from prior letter relations to increase efficiency of

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Working Memory and Fluid Reasoning: Same or Different?

subsequent processing of number relations independently contributed to the

amount of variation in fluid reasoning.

Why does this matter?

These results suggest we may be seriously underestimating fluid reasoning ability in

people by imposing strict time pressures. This study is consistent with other recent
research suggesting that fast intelligence can be distinguished from slow
intelligence.

Researchers, educators, and business leaders attempting to assess a persons level of

fluid reasoning face a dilemma: Do you measure the persons fluid reasoning ability
through a highly speed task or do you give the individual more of an opportunity to
display his or her reasoning power? As Chuderski notes,

The former testing method [highly speeded tests] will measure the ability to cope
with complexity in a dynamic environment, thus having a high real-world validity, as
the technological and informational pressure of the world increases rapidly, but it
may underestimate people who regardless of their limited capacity would work out
good solutions in less dynamic environments. The latter method [more relaxed time
pressures] will give a more comprehensive account of reasoning ability, including the
contribution of intellectual faculties that lay beyond WM, and seem to be
complementary to it, but it could also include a lot of noise (e.g., learned task-
dependent strategies) negatively influencing the evaluation of future effectiveness of
an individual in demanding, timed, and completely novel tasks.

This is important, because given more time, people can compensate for their
working memory capacity limitations. For instance, people show large
improvements in fluid reasoning after learning how to draw diagrams to represent a
problem. When Kenneth Gilhooly and his colleagues presented syllogisms orally, it
placed a higher demand on working memory as participants had to store the
premises in their head. But when the syllogisms were presented with all the premises
remaining on the projector screen, people performed better because they could
unload the premises from their working memory and free up limited resources to
construct an efficient mental model of the problem.

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Working Memory and Fluid Reasoning: Same or Different?

Over the past decade, John Sweller and colleagues have designed instructional
techniques that relieve working memory burdens on students and increase learning
and interest. Drawing on both the expertise and working memory literatures, they
match the complexity of learning situations to the learner, attempting to reduce
unnecessary working memory loads that may interfere with reasoning and learning,
and optimize cognitive processes most relevant to learning.

There are also implications for brain training interventions. As Ive mentioned in an
earlier article, the cognitive training literature is a swamp. While some studies find
that improving working memory improves fluid reasoning, others studies find a lack
of transfer.

A potential cause for the inconsistencies in the cognitive training literature may be
the timing of the tasks. For instance, Susanne Jaeggi and colleagues administered
their fluid reasoning tests under extreme time constraints (e.g., 10-11 minutes for 18
Ravens items), and found that working memory training showed an increase in fluid
reasoning performance. In contrast, Roberto Colom and colleagues administered
fluid reasoning tests under standard time pressures and found no effect of working
memory training on fluid reasoning.

These contradictory findings make sense in light of Chuderskis study: when fluid
reasoning tasks have strict time limits, they are essentially tests of working memory.
So you would expect more of a transfer from working memory to fluid reasoning
under such conditions. But when fluid reasoning tasks have more relaxed time
pressures, working memory is more weakly associated with fluid reasoning, and
other cognitive mechanisms come into play, such as relational learning

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Working Memory and Fluid Reasoning: Same or Different?

and associative learning. Also, external aids can be employed, such as the use of
diagrams to facilitate the construction of more elaborate and efficient mental
models.

Conclusion

Working memory and fluid reasoning: same or different? It depends. Imposing

extreme time pressures on an IQ test forces people to draw almost exclusively on
their limited capacity working memory capacity, whereas giving people more time to
think and reason gives them more of a chance to bring to the table other cognitive
functions that contribute to their intellectual brilliance.

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