Cognitive Ability in Everyday Life: The Utility of Open-Source Measures

Abstract

The measurement of individual differences in cognitive ability has a long and important history in psychology, but it has been impeded by the proprietary nature of most assessment measures. With the development of validated open-source measures of ability (collected in the International Cognitive Ability Resource, or ICAR, available at ICAR-project.com), it is now possible for many researchers to assess ability in large surveys or small, lab-based studies without the expenses associated with proprietary measures. We review the history of ability measurement and discuss how the growing set of items included in ICAR allows ability assessments to be more generally available to all researchers.