Raven's Progressive Matrices: The Test With No Words, and How to Solve It
One of the most famous intelligence tests in the world has not a single word in its questions. It is a grid of shapes with the last piece missing, and your job is to work out what belongs there. It is called Raven's Progressive Matrices, and you have probably seen it before: if you have ever solved a "which shape comes next?" puzzle, you know the format.
Who made it, and why
John C. Raven, a British psychologist trained in the tradition of Charles Spearman, devised the test in 1936 and published it in 1938. Spearman had proposed that a general factor of intelligence exists, the well-known g factor, and that it shows up best in tasks requiring you to work out relationships rather than in tasks that rely on vocabulary or acquired knowledge. Raven wanted a tool that measured that ability to reason things out as cleanly as possible.
The test took off for a practical reason: since it does not depend on language, it worked with people from very different backgrounds and reading levels, and even with people who had trouble communicating. It was used in military selection during the Second World War. Today there are versions for different levels: Standard, Coloured (for children and older adults) and Advanced (for high scorers).
What a matrix looks like
Each item shows a grid, usually 3×3, with eight visible figures and one gap. From several options, you pick the one that completes the pattern. Difficulty rises item by item, hence "progressive." The patterns are built from a few rules that can be combined.
A method for solving one
There is no secret trick, but there is a working order that saves a lot of frustration:
- Look at rows and columns separately. Ask what changes from left to right and from top to bottom.
- Hunt for one rule at a time. It might be size, number of elements, orientation, color or position.
- Know the usual suspects. An element that appears once in every row, a figure formed by adding or subtracting pieces of two others, a change that always moves in the same direction.
- Predict the answer before you look at the options. That keeps you from being lured by an alternative that merely "looks right."
- Eliminate. If one rule already rules out three choices, focus on the rest.
One more caution: do not confuse "hard to see" with "hard to understand." Plenty of Raven items feel impossible for thirty seconds and then turn obvious the moment you find the single rule behind them. If you are stuck, shift your attention to another row or column instead of staring at the same cell.
Culture-free? More like culture-reduced
Raven is often called a "culture-free" test, but researchers prefer "culture-reduced." Even without words, solving these patterns takes some familiarity with the format: reading a grid, understanding that each row is a sequence, handling abstract problems. People with more test experience and more formal schooling tend to do better, and scores can change with practice. It depends less on language than other tests do, but it is not entirely neutral.
When the items get hard
At advanced levels the rules stop being obvious at a glance and start to combine. A shape might rotate a quarter turn in each column while another element grows in number across each row. Sometimes there is a "distribution of three values" rule: each row contains three different versions of a figure, once apiece, and you have to deduce which one is missing. In other cases, the third figure in a row is the overlay of the first two, keeping what matches or what differs. Ambiguity is rare: a well-made item has exactly one answer that satisfies every rule at once.
What helps is staying organized: solve one rule, hold it in mind, move on to the next. People who try to take in everything at once tend to get swamped, and a swamped brain starts guessing. Practicing calmly, without a stopwatch at first, is the best way to start recognizing these rules at a glance.
Our test includes visual pattern items, so you can try this method out right now. Predict first, look at the options second, and notice how it changes the way you read each grid.
