Skip to content

Nonverbal Reasoning Tests: What Culture-Reduced Actually Claims

Nonverbal reasoning tests replace words with shapes. That removes a language barrier, but it does not make a test culture-free. Here is what the evidence shows.

By Published Updated 5 min read

Reign Creative LLC makes IQ Test & Brain Training Games, which this article links to, so we have a commercial interest in it. How we write and check articles.

Key takeaways

  • A nonverbal reasoning test replaces words and numbers with shapes, so the candidate infers a rule from figures rather than reading a passage. Employers often label the same family of items diagrammatic, inductive or figural reasoning.
  • Removing language removes one specific barrier — reading load in a second language — but it does not remove schooling effects, familiarity with two-dimensional diagrams, or test-taking conventions.
  • Published work in clinical neuropsychology has found some of the most consistent cross-cultural differences on visuoperceptual and visually mediated executive tasks, which are exactly the tasks often assumed to be neutral.
  • The evidence is not one-directional. A cross-cultural comparison on a Wechsler battery reported that matrix reasoning and working memory subtests showed no cross-cultural effect while knowledge-loaded subtests did.
  • IQ Test & Brain Training Games, our own app, has an IQ-style test that covers patterns and spatial reasoning among other areas, but its listing does not describe the item formats and calls the results estimates based on app activities, so check the items yourself before treating it as nonverbal reasoning practice.

A nonverbal reasoning test asks you to infer a rule from shapes instead of from words or numbers. A row of figures changes in some systematic way; you pick the option that continues the change. The selling point attached to these tests — that removing language removes culture — is where the claim outruns the evidence. Dropping the reading load genuinely helps a candidate whose first language is not the test's language. It does not make the item neutral, because a diagram is a convention that people learn, and the published research on cross-cultural testing is much less comfortable than the marketing.

What the items actually look like

Three formats cover most of what you will meet. A figural series shows a sequence of frames and asks for the next one. A matrix shows a grid with one cell missing and asks which option belongs there. An odd-one-out shows several figures governed by a shared rule and asks which breaks it.

The rules themselves are a short list applied in combination: rotation, reflection, translation, addition or removal of an element, change of shading, change of size, change of count, and progression along any of those. Difficulty rises when rules are combined, when two rules operate on different features at once, or when the relevant feature is not the visually loudest one.

University careers services group these with numerical and verbal tests under selection testing, note that they are timed and have right and wrong answers, and observe that logical and diagrammatic formats are used particularly often for technical roles. That last point is worth holding on to: in employment settings these tests are chosen for predictive convenience, not because anyone believes shapes are a purer window onto thought.

What removing language removes

Exactly one thing, reliably: the requirement to read fluently in the test's language under time pressure. That is a real and worthwhile gain, and it is why nonverbal formats exist at all. The nonverbal Army Beta of 1919 was built for that reason, as the history of who invented the IQ test sets out.

What it does not remove is the construct question — what IQ tests actually measure is the same question whether the items carry words or shapes. Nor does it remove everything else the candidate brings. Familiarity with two-dimensional representations of objects, the convention that a sequence runs left to right, the expectation that exactly one answer is correct, the habit of working quickly under a clock, prior exposure to puzzle-shaped items — all of these vary with schooling and with what a person has been asked to do before, and none of them is language.

The evidence points both ways, and the detail is the point

Work in cross-cultural neuropsychology has repeatedly found that the assumption of neutrality is unsafe. One study of cognitive testing across cultural groups reported that "the most striking, consistent biases are seen on tests of basic visuoperception as well as executive tasks utilizing visual stimuli... rather than on tasks with a prominent language component", and noted that this "runs counter to common clinical practice in neuropsychology which emphasizes the use of non-verbal tests, presumed to be less biased than verbal tasks". The same paper points out that many instruments were developed and normed in a narrow set of populations, which builds the comparison group's assumptions into the scale itself.

A different study, comparing South African and British university students on a Wechsler battery, found that the battery "lacks measurement invariance between the two groups, suggesting that it may be tapping different constructs in each group" — but also that the subtests "tapping WM and fluid reasoning (Matrix Reasoning) showed no cross-cultural effects", while knowledge-loaded subtests did. So the honest summary is not "nonverbal tests are biased" and not "nonverbal tests are fair". It is that fairness is a property of a particular test used with a particular group for a particular decision, and it has to be demonstrated rather than assumed from the absence of words.

That is also how the professional standards frame it. The Standards for Educational and Psychological Testing, published jointly by the American Educational Research Association, the American Psychological Association and the National Council on Measurement in Education, treat fairness as a technical issue of test development and use rather than a feature you can read off the item format.

Practising without being misled

If you are preparing for a real selection test, the useful work is narrow: learn the rule vocabulary, practise spotting which feature is varying, and practise under the clock so that scanning becomes automatic. The sister article on how abstract reasoning items are built goes through item anatomy and distractor design in more detail, and spatial reasoning and number sense covers a related question people conflate with this one.

What will not help is treating a practice score as a measurement of yourself. Repeated exposure to a format changes your score on that format, which is one reason working memory and training is worth reading before drawing conclusions from any improvement, and why the evidence review on brain training apps applies here too.

Does this app contain nonverbal reasoning items?

IQ Test & Brain Training Games is our own app, built by Reign Creative. Its IQ-style test covers numerical reasoning, logic, patterns, vocabulary, working memory, spatial reasoning and processing speed, and around it sit logic games built on analogies, sequences, conditional reasoning, deduction and patterns, plus memory, focus, vocabulary and mental math games. Its listing does not describe the item formats, so we cannot tell you whether any of them is a figural series or a matrix, and we do not claim that they are. What the listing does say is that IQ test and other results are estimates based on app activities, not medical, psychological, clinical, educational-placement, employment or professional diagnostic assessments — so whatever result the app shows is not a nonverbal reasoning score in the sense this article describes.

That is the honest position, stated plainly rather than buried at the bottom. If figural reasoning practice is specifically what you need, check the item formats yourself or look for a product built for it. The app page describes what the app covers. The rest of this subject — scoring, limitations, item types — sits in the IQ tests and reasoning hub, and the broader education and brain category collects the practice and memory material.

Good to know

Frequently asked questions

What is a nonverbal reasoning test?
It is a reasoning test whose items are made of shapes, patterns or diagrams rather than words or numbers. A typical item shows a sequence or grid of figures that changes according to a hidden rule, and asks which option continues it. Employers frequently use the labels diagrammatic, inductive or abstract reasoning for the same family, and university careers services group them with numerical and verbal tests as timed selection tests.
Are nonverbal reasoning tests culture-fair?
Less exposed to language, yes. Free of culture, no. Research in cross-cultural neuropsychology has found striking and consistent group differences on tests of basic visuoperception and on executive tasks that use visual stimuli, despite those being the tasks clinicians often assume are less biased. Schooling, exposure to diagrammatic conventions and test familiarity all travel with the person taking the test.
Does a nonverbal test measure something different from a verbal one?
Often, but not always in the way people expect. One published comparison of South African and British students on a Wechsler battery concluded that the battery lacked measurement invariance between the groups, meaning it may have been tapping different constructs in each — while the matrix reasoning and working memory subtests specifically showed no cross-cultural effect. That is a more interesting result than a blanket claim in either direction.
Does IQ Test & Brain Training Games include nonverbal reasoning items?
Its listing does not say. The app's IQ-style test covers numerical reasoning, logic, patterns, vocabulary, working memory, spatial reasoning and processing speed, and its logic games include sequences and patterns, but the listing does not describe item formats such as figural series, matrices or diagrams, so we do not claim them. If figural reasoning practice is specifically what you need, look at the items in the app itself, or at a product built for that purpose, before relying on it.

Sources

  1. Origins Matter: Culture Impacts Cognitive Testing in Parkinson's Disease (opens in a new tab)Frontiers in Human Neuroscience — accessed
  2. A cross-cultural comparison between South African and British students on the Wechsler Adult Intelligence Scales Third Edition (WAIS-III) (opens in a new tab)Frontiers in Psychology — accessed
  3. Standards for Educational and Psychological Testing (2014 Edition) (opens in a new tab)American Educational Research Association, with APA and NCME — accessed
  4. Reasoning tests - numerical, verbal, logical and diagrammatical (opens in a new tab)University of Manchester Careers Service — accessed

About the author

— The independent app studio that builds the apps covered on this site and publishes every article here. On Google Play it publishes as Reign Collective Apps.

We use AI tools to help research, draft and edit our articles. Each article lists the sources its factual claims rely on, and details about our apps come from their live Google Play listings. No article on this site has been reviewed by an independent expert unless the reviewer is named on it.

Spotted an error? Tell us — how corrections are handled is set out in our editorial policy.

Keep reading