What Is the Cattell Culture Fair Intelligence Test (CFIT)?

The Cattell Culture Fair Intelligence Test (CFIT) is a nonverbal intelligence test that Raymond B. Cattell published through the Institute of Personality and Ability Testing (IPAT) in Champaign, Illinois, beginning in 1949. It was designed to measure "fluid intelligence," the capacity to reason through novel problems, using abstract shapes and patterns rather than words or school knowledge. The test comes in three difficulty scales, and its two upper scales are built from four short item types: series, classifications, matrices, and conditions. This article covers where the CFIT came from, how it is structured, what "culture fair" was supposed to mean, and what mainstream psychometrics now says about that ambition.

The CFIT began as an explicitly bolder project. In 1940, Cattell published a paper in the Journal of Educational Psychology titled "A culture-free intelligence test," describing his attempt to build a measure that would not depend on the language, schooling, or customs a test taker happened to grow up with. In 1949 his institute, IPAT, released the first version commercially under the name Culture Free Intelligence Test.

The theory behind the test was Cattell's most influential idea. He proposed that general intelligence has two major components: fluid intelligence (often abbreviated "Gf"), which handles novel reasoning problems, and crystallized intelligence ("Gc"), which reflects knowledge and skills accumulated through education and experience. You can read more about that distinction in our article on fluid and crystallized intelligence. Because fluid reasoning depends less on what a person has been taught, Cattell argued that a test built purely from unfamiliar figural material could tap intelligence in a way that was fairer across cultural and educational backgrounds.

The name itself tells the story of a retreat from the original claim. By the time IPAT issued the 1973 manual, Measuring Intelligence with the Culture Fair Tests, "culture free" had become "culture fair." Cattell and his colleagues had accepted that no test can be entirely free of culture; the revised goal was to reduce cultural loading, not eliminate it.

The Culture Fair series consists of three scales of nonverbal visual puzzles, covering test takers from roughly age four upward. Scale 1 is for the youngest examinees, and parts of it use physical objects instead of paper and pencil. Psychological testing textbooks describe it as a mix of simple tasks such as mazes, copying symbols, and identifying similar drawings. Scales 2 and 3 serve children from about age eight up through adults, with Scale 3 pitched at a higher difficulty level, and each of these scales exists in two parallel forms, A and B.

Scales 2 and 3 each contain the same four subtests:

• Series: the test taker studies a progression of abstract figures and selects the drawing that correctly completes the sequence.

• Classifications: several drawings are shown and the task is to pick the one that differs from the others, an "odd one out" format.

• Matrices: a grid of patterns has one cell missing, and the test taker chooses the option that completes it, the same general format used in a matrix reasoning test.

• Conditions: the test taker examines several geometric designs and identifies which one satisfies a stated condition, a format sometimes described as topological reasoning.

All four formats rely on figural material with minimal verbal content. Factor-analytic work has generally found that the CFIT loads strongly on the fluid intelligence factor, which is consistent with what Cattell intended it to measure.

Cattell's reasoning was straightforward. If test items use only abstract shapes that no culture specifically teaches, then differences in language, schooling, and social background should matter less to the score. A child in a rural village and a child in an urban school district would face the same unfamiliar patterns. Historically, the scales were used for purposes such as special education placement and college and vocational counseling, and translations and adaptations spread widely because the item content required so little linguistic modification.

It is worth being precise about the claim. "Culture fair" never meant that scores would be identical across groups, or that the test measured something biological and untouched by environment. It meant that the test's content drew less heavily on culturally specific knowledge than vocabulary or arithmetic items do. For a broader treatment of the category and how such tests are used today, see our overview of culture fair intelligence tests.

The mainstream position in modern psychometrics is that reducing cultural loading is achievable and worthwhile, while eliminating it is not possible. Several lines of evidence support this conclusion.

A 2022 integrative review by Corentin Gonthier in Cognitive Research: Principles and Implications, which names Cattell's culture fair test directly, documents that the perception, manipulation, and conceptualization of visuo-spatial information differ measurably across cultures in ways that are relevant to test performance. Gonthier concludes that cultural assumptions are deeply ingrained in all visuo-spatial reasoning tests, which rules out treating any of them as intrinsically culture fair.

Test instructions are a second problem. Researchers developing newer fair-assessment instruments have pointed out that classic nonverbal tests, the CFIT among them, still deliver their instructions in language, which puts examinees who are not proficient in the test language at a disadvantage before the first item is even attempted.

None of this makes the CFIT a poor test of fluid reasoning. It remains a reasonable measure of the construct it targets, and reducing language demands genuinely helps in many settings. The honest summary is that "culture fair" describes a matter of degree. Every test is created by people inside a culture, and every score reflects some mixture of ability and experience.

The original English-language CFIT is now largely a historical instrument, and its most active descendants live elsewhere. In German-speaking countries, Rudolf H. Weiß revised Scale 2 into the CFT 20-R (Grundintelligenztest Skala 2 – Revision), published by Hogrefe in 2006. According to the publisher, it measures general fluid ability in Cattell's sense through the same four subtests (series continuation, classifications, matrices, and topological conclusions), covers ages 8 and a half through 19 plus adults 20 to 60, takes about 60 minutes including instructions (35 to 40 minutes for the short form), and carries representative school norms based on 4,300 students.

High-IQ societies still recognize the Cattell line, with limits. The Triple Nine Society lists a combined raw score of 85 on Cattell forms A and B as qualifying, but only for test dates before January 2, 2015; for newer testing it accepts the CFT 20-R at a score of 146. Researchers have kept the test in service as well. The Cambridge Centre for Ageing and Neuroscience administered the full Cattell Scale 2, Form A, to adults aged 19 to 87 and adapted its odd-one-out subtest for brain imaging studies of fluid intelligence published in the journal eLife.

If you are curious about your own fluid reasoning, sitting an original CFIT is difficult in practice: the classic scales are dated, and legitimate administration runs through qualified professionals and licensed publishers. A modern online option is the RIOT IQ test (the Reasoning and Intelligence Online Test), developed by RIOT IQ with psychometrician Dr. Russell T. Warne for adults 18 and older. It includes 15 subtests across six cognitive indices (verbal reasoning, fluid reasoning, spatial ability, working memory, processing speed, and reaction time), takes about 52 minutes, and reports scores on the familiar mean-100, standard-deviation-15 IQ scale. In the spirit of Cattell's own concession, it does not claim to be culture free, and like any online test it does not replace an individually administered diagnostic evaluation. You can take the RIOT IQ test at riotiq.com.

CFIT stands for Culture Fair Intelligence Test, sometimes written as the Cattell Culture Fair Intelligence Test after its author, Raymond B. Cattell. Early versions were titled the Culture Free Intelligence Test before the name was softened.

It measures fluid intelligence, the ability to reason through novel abstract problems, using nonverbal items (series, classifications, matrices, and conditions) rather than vocabulary or learned facts.

Rarely in its original English form. Its most active successor is the German CFT 20-R revision published by Hogrefe, and researchers such as the Cam-CAN aging project have continued to use Scale 2 in studies of fluid intelligence.

No. Modern reviews show that even wholly nonverbal items depend on culturally shaped ways of perceiving and manipulating visual information, and instructions still require language. A culture fair IQ test can reduce cultural loading, and that is the accepted limit of the claim.

Raven's uses a single item format, the matrix, throughout. The CFIT's upper scales combine four different figural formats, which was Cattell's way of sampling fluid reasoning more broadly than one item type allows.

There is no official online version of the original scales, and unofficial "CFIT test" quizzes circulating online lack current norms. For a normed online measure of reasoning ability, a modern instrument such as the RIOT IQ test is a more defensible choice.

1. Cattell, R. B. (1940). A culture-free intelligence test. I. Journal of Educational Psychology, 31(3), 161-179. doi.org

2. Gonthier, C. (2022). Cross-cultural differences in visuo-spatial processing and the culture-fairness of visuo-spatial intelligence tests: An integrative review and a model for matrices tasks. Cognitive Research: Principles and Implications, 7, 11. doi.org

3. Knights, E., Henson, R. N., Morcom, A. M., Mitchell, D. J., & Tsvetanov, K. A. (2025). Neural evidence of functional compensation for fluid intelligence in healthy ageing. eLife, 13, RP93327. pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov

4. Kijamet, D., Wollschläger, R., Keller, U., & Ugen, S. (2025). FLUX (Fluid Intelligence Luxembourg): Development and validation of a fair tablet-based test of cognitive ability in multicultural and multilingual children. Journal of Intelligence, 13(11), 139. pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov

5. Weiß, R. H. (2006). Grundintelligenztest Skala 2 - Revision (CFT 20-R) mit Wortschatztest und Zahlenfolgentest - Revision (WS/ZF-R). Hogrefe Testzentrale. testzentrale.de

6. Triple Nine Society. (n.d.). Qualifying test scores. triplenine.org

7. Gale Encyclopedia of Medicine. (n.d.). Culture-fair test. Encyclopedia.com. encyclopedia.com

Hero photo: a hand fitting a wooden piece into a large symmetrical pattern-block design. Photo by Annielogue via Wikimedia Commons, CC BY-SA 4.0 (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0), cropped.