The Differences and Interrelationship Between Fluid and Crystallized Cognitive Ability

Both types of intelligence are important in work and everyday life. For example, when solving say a production problem such as improving the planned maintenance system a manager may need to rely on fluid intelligence to come up with a strategy to improve the maintenance plan while also employing crystallized intelligence to recall the specific information about machine capabilities and breakdowns, production schedules and targets, maintenance staff and capacities, budget available and so on which need to be taken into account. Fluid intelligence along with its counterpart, crystallized intelligence, are both factors of what Cattell (the father of IQ) referred to as general intelligence. While fluid intelligence involves our current ability to reason and deal with complex information around us (more like the CPU and RAM of a computer), crystallized intelligence involves learning, knowledge, and skills that are acquired over a lifetime (more like that information stored on the hard drive of a computer).

Crystallized intelligence is not a form of fluid intelligence that has become "crystallized." Instead, the two facets of general intelligence are considered separate and distinct, but fluid and crystallized intelligence are at the same time intertwined. Crystallized intelligence is formed through the utilization of fluid intelligence when information is learned. By using fluid intelligence to reason and think about problems, the information can then be transferred to long-term memory so that it can become part of crystallized intelligence.

In the tables that follow, we will highlight the differences in how people function when they have:

⦁ Low vs high fluid ability
⦁ Low vs high crystallised ability