Can a one minute game measure your IQ or brain age?

What an IQ test is, and why it needs a frame

An IQ test is a battery of many different tasks, vocabulary, reasoning, memory, speed, given in a standard way by a trained examiner, and scored against a large sample matched for age. The score is a position relative to that sample.

A single game of 20 seconds on a phone has none of that. One task, an uncontrolled device, no examiner, and a population of volunteers. It can tell you how fast you reacted to a light today. It cannot tell you your IQ, and any site that turns a game score into an IQ is inventing a number.

Where brain age comes from, and why Headgame does not show it

Some abilities change with age in a measurable way. In a calibrated study, simple reaction time rose by about 0.55 ms per year between 18 and 65 (Woods et al., 2015a). A large online study of 48,537 people found that different abilities peak at different ages, some around the end of high school, some plateau in early adulthood and start to decline in the 30s, others do not peak until the 40s or later (Hartshorne and Germine, 2015).

A brain age reverses that logic. It takes your score and returns the age whose average matches it. The problem is that the spread between people of the same age is far larger than the change across decades. With 0.55 ms per year, a 20 ms gap, the difference between two phones, would move your brain age by about 36 years. That is noise dressed up as a diagnosis.

The Lumosity case

In January 2016, the US Federal Trade Commission announced that Lumos Labs, the company behind Lumosity, would pay 2 million dollars to settle charges that it had deceived consumers with claims that its games could sharpen performance at work and school and delay age related decline (FTC, 2016).

The same year, a large review of the brain training literature found extensive evidence that training raises performance on the trained tasks, less evidence for closely related tasks, and little evidence for distant tasks or everyday cognitive performance (Simons et al., 2016).

What Headgame shows instead

Each game gives a raw score, a time in ms, a level, a number of points. When a public norm exists, the score becomes a percentile against that named norm, for example better than 62% of 70,940 Human Benchmark games, with the source under it. When no norm exists, Headgame says so and shows no percentile.

The weekly card turns these percentiles into stats from 35 to 99, and mixes them with your phone down time. It is a measure of your week in the app, a game with honest rules. Nothing more, and the method page explains every step.

Sources

1. Simons D.J., Boot W.R., Charness N. et al. (2016). Do brain training programs work? Psychological Science in the Public Interest 17(3), 103 to 186. doi.org/10.1177/1529100616661983
2. Woods D.L., Wyma J.M., Yund E.W., Herron T.J., Reed B. (2015). Factors influencing the latency of simple reaction time. Frontiers in Human Neuroscience 9, 131. doi.org/10.3389/fnhum.2015.00131
3. Hartshorne J.K., Germine L.T. (2015). When does cognitive functioning peak? Psychological Science 26(4), 433 to 443. doi.org/10.1177/0956797614567339
4. Federal Trade Commission (5 January 2016). Lumosity to pay $2 million to settle FTC deceptive advertising charges for its brain training program. ftc.gov, press release of 5 January 2016