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Tests of Information are perhaps the most familiar and mainstream of all types of cognitive tests. They are to be found in popular board games like Trivial Pursuit, hit TV game shows like Jeopardy and Who wants to be a millionaire? and trivia nights at your local bar. The test had long been used by psychiatrists as a quick and dirty measure of intelligence but psychologists eschewed it until WWI when it was included in the Army Alpha Group IQ test. To the shock of many, it proved to be one of the best in the battery, correlating better with the overall score than much more respected tests like Arithmetic, Analogies and Disarranged Sentences (Wechsler, 1958). It also showed a much better bell curve with fewer zero scores and fewer people piling up at the maximum score (Wechsler 1958).

Although the test is easily criticized as culturally biased and a measure of education not intelligence, Wechsler’s experience showed such criticisms to be unfounded, particularly if the specific items were chosen skillfully. Wechsler defined a good item as one that the average person, with average opportunity has a chance to learn for himself. So a question like “how heavy is the average American newborn baby?” would be much better than “what state produces the most gold?”. “How far is it from Toronto to Tokyo?” much better than “how far is it from the Earth to the sun?”

“The fact is,” wrote Wechsler “all objections considered, the range of a man’s knowledge is generally a very good indication of his intellectual capacity.”

In addition to this, such tests are fun to take and easy to devise, administer and score. Given all these merits, I decided to include an Information subtest in the PAIS. The PAIS Information subtest consists of 28 items ranging from extremely easy (snake) to profoundly difficult (Native American carved in wood). In a preliminary norming sample of 16 native born English speaking Canadians found at my local pool hall, the mean score was 12 with an SD of 3.4. Scores ranged from 4 (a suspected retardate) to 18 (university alum) corresponding to IQs of 65 to 126 (Canadian norms) or 69 to 128 (U.S. norms).

A preliminary estimate for how this test maps to IQ is as follows:

IQ (U.S. norms) = (Information raw score)(4.29) + 52

IQ (Canadian norms/U.S. white norms) = (information raw score)(4.43) + 47

Information itemPercent of the general Canadian population passing
1. Snake100
2. Eggs100
3. Mac100
4. Taj94
5. Tower88
6. United States81
7. Color81
8. Fast69
9. Crocodile 63
10. Jesus63
11. Joe44
12. Pig44
13. Name38
14. Iron38
15. Dr.31
16. Independence31
17. 8431
18. Wonderful19
19. Space19
20. Computer19
21. Lord13
22. Capital13
23. Gene13
24. Complex6
25. Founder6
26. Skeleton0
27. Bird0
28. Native American carved in wood0