Does temperature or air flow in the room impact performance on an IQ test?

Note: This is a section of a longer article. To go to the start, click here.

Very little. To test this, we have asked our participants (n = 655) the following four questions:

1. What is the temperature in the room where you are right now?

2. How fresh is the air in the room where you are now?

3. Is there any window or door open to the outdoors right now in the room where you are?

4. Is there any window or door open to another room right now in the room where you are?

   
   

Next, we correlated their IQ scores with their responses to these questions. Regarding the first two questions (the room temperature and freshness of air), we obtained very low, basically negligible correlation (r = -0.09 and r = 0.06 respectively). For the questions regarding whether they had windows or doors open, we obtained somewhat higher, but still relatively low correlations of r = -0.14 between IQ and having windows or doors open to the outdoors and r = 0.12 between IQ and having windows or doors open to the indoors. Note that the first correlation is negative, meaning that having windows or doors open for fresh air to the outside is related to a bit worse performance on IQ tests, which is surprising. This translates into a difference of 4 IQ points between those that did not have their windows or doors opened to the outdoors (mean IQ = 101) and those that did (mean IQ = 97). On the contrary, having windows or doors opened to the indoors was related to a bit better performance that translated to a IQ point difference in favor of those with opened windows or doors to the indoors (mean IQ = 101) compared to those with closed windows or doors (mean IQ = 98). Given very low correlations, we do not want to overinterpret these findings but, speculatively, a surprising negative impact of open windows/doors to the outdoors could perhaps be related to unfavorable weather conditions or noise from the outside, or it could be caused by hidden confounding factors. Of course, at sufficiently hot or cold temperatures (that are extremely unpleasant) task performance would surely have been impaired, but our test takers were almost entirely situated in places with reasonable temperatures. 

What do the other studies say?

Unlike ours, some other studies that examined the relationship between environmental conditions while taking tests indeed found that the performance on tests is negatively influenced by unfavorable room conditions such as room temperature or levels of oxygen (e.g. Haverinen-Shaughnessy & Shaughnessy, 2015; Hoque & Weil, 2016).

Takeaways

• Room conditions such as temperature or freshness of the air had minimal effects on IQ (though we did not test extreme conditions, just the natural conditions people found themselves in)

If you'd like to read the full report, of which this is a section, as one long PDF, you can download it here.

And if you'd like to understand where your intellectual strengths and weaknesses lie, try the cognitive assessment tool that we developed out of this research:

Launch the Cognitive Assessment!