“Sport is an unsolvable puzzle in a chaotic situation…”

-Dr. Scott Goldman, Co-creator of the AIQ

The Athletic Intelligence Quotient (AIQ) is designed to help athletes understand and adapt their cognitive abilities with greater precision and awareness in pursuit of consistently optimal performance in any sport arena. The AIQ assessment offers more sophisticated insight into how an athlete does what they do as well as how they can be more efficient, versatile, and reliable in their performance domain.

The AIQ provides clarity regarding an athlete’s cognitive strengths and limitations related to performance, then offers individualized recommendations for strategies to overcome various performance challenges. Just as various applications help to quantify metrics underlying the physiological mechanisms behind sport performance e.g., VO2 Max, HR variability, the AIQ provides information about an athlete’s performance-specific cognitive abilities.

Athletic intelligence is defined as those abilities that enable athletes to perceive their surroundings in real time, learn and recall game information fluently, react quickly and accurately to stimuli, and execute rapid decision-making for extended periods.

Many of the abilities typically regarded as intelligence are often a general reflection of acquired knowledge. Thus, the AIQ is designed to reduce the influence acquired knowledge from the assessment process and exclusively measure an individual’s cognitive abilities, such as associative memory, visual spatial processing, reaction time, and processing speed.

For example, the cognitive abilities that allow an athlete to select the most effective routes for scoring within a dynamic setting, to adjust to an opponent’s strategies during competition, to make decisions efficiently, to retain/apply new information effectively, and to inhibit incorrect responses i.e., avoid false starts, are all measured by the AIQ.

The evaluation of specific cognitive abilities in the context of sport performance provides greater precision and transferable feedback that athletes can immediately apply to their training and competitive experiences. Research has shown that individuals with higher AIQ scores tend to get more playing time, tend to start more, and tend to have longer careers in sport. Many professional franchises within the MLB, NFL, NBA, NHL, MLS, as well as collegiate athletics teams, and numerous training academies utilize the AIQ for talent selection and player development.