Should Intelligence Tests Be Speeded or Unspeeded? A Brief Review of the Effects of Time Pressure on Response Processes and an Experimental Study with Raven’s Matrices

Abstract

Intelligence tests are often performed under time constraints for practical reasons, but the effects of time pressure on reasoning performance are poorly understood. The first part of this work provides a brief review of major expected effects of time pressure, which includes forcing participants to skip items, convoking a mental speed factor, constraining response times, qualitatively altering cognitive processing, affecting anxiety and motivation, and interacting with individual differences. The second part presents data collected with Raven’s matrices under three conditions of speededness to provide further insight into the complex effects of time pressure, with three major findings. First, even mild time pressure (with enough time available for all participants to complete the task at a leisurely pace) induced speeding throughout the whole task, starting with the very first item, and participants sped up more than was actually required. Second, time pressure came with lower confidence and poorer strategy use and a substantial decrease of accuracy (d = 0.35), even when controlling for response time at the item level—indicating a detrimental effect on cognitive processing beyond speeding. Third, time pressure disproportionately reduced response times for difficult items and participants with high ability, working memory capacity, or need for cognition, although this did not differentially affect ability estimates. Overall, both the review and empirical sections show that the effects of time pressure go well beyond forcing participants to speed or skip the last few items and make even mild time constraints inadvisable when attempting to measure maximal performance, especially for high-performing samples.