Seeing red? The effect of colour on intelligence test performance

Article history: Received 18 September 2014 Received in revised form 30 October 2014 Accepted 18 November 2014 Available online 5 December 2014 A series of recent studies reported that seeing red was associated with poor intelligence test performance in university students. Here we test for the first time the effect of colour on intelligence test scores in an adult sample and across a large battery of ability tests. Overall 200 British adults completedRaven'smatriceswithout colourmanipulation (i.e. baseline assessment); afterwards, they viewed a string of letters and digits in either red or green before completing six additional ability tests (i.e. word fluency, logical reasoning, vocabulary, syllogisms, verbal reasoning, and knowledge) and rating their self-perceived performance for each measure. We found no evidence for an association between colour and intelligence test scores or self-perceived performance, before and after adjusting for intelligence at baseline. The discrepancywith previous findings is likely to be due to testing adult rather than student samples, which in turn has implications for the recruitment and selection of study samples in future intelligence research. © 2014 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.