It has long been observed that when participants perform a large battery of cognitive tasks, a dominant latent factor of “general ability” emerges that explains a high degree of individual-level variation on these tasks. The psychometric basis of fluid intelligence has also been informed by a growing understanding of its psychological underpinnings. Indeed, fluid intelligence as a construct originated with the need for educators and employers to assess the aptitudes of their students or employees. This construct has been of particular interest within the domain of psychology for a host of reasons, most notably the fact that individual differences in fluid intelligence have been associated with real-world outcomes, including academic and occupational success. The construct of fluid intelligence captures the general ability to reason, to flexibly engage with the world, to recognize patterns, and to solve problems in a manner that does not depend upon specific previous knowledge or experience. This does not alter our adherence to PLOS ONE policies on sharing data and materials. This funding source had no direct involvement in study design, data collection, analysis, manuscript preparation, or any other direct involvement in this research.Ĭompeting interests: Since completing data collection and analysis, Vanessa Simmering has become employed by the nonprofit ACT, Inc. This work was supported in part by Office of Naval Research Grant ONR-N000141712049 to C. This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited.ĭata Availability: All relevant data are within the paper and its Supporting Information files.įunding: Support was received from Wisconsin Alumni Research Foundation grant 184458 to Vanessa Simmering and C. Received: FebruAccepted: AugPublished: August 22, 2019Ĭopyright: © 2019 Cochrane et al. Cheatham, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, UNITED STATES Furthermore, these patterns were indistinguishable across age groups, indicating a hierarchical cognitive basis of intelligence that is stable from childhood into adulthood.Ĭitation: Cochrane A, Simmering V, Green CS (2019) Fluid intelligence is related to capacity in memory as well as attention: Evidence from middle childhood and adulthood. In contrast, attention scores did not mediate the relations between working memory and intelligence. However, the links between attention and intelligence scores were fully mediated by working memory measures. More specifically, we found two tasks that are typically labeled as “attentional measures”, Multiple Object Tracking and Enumeration, and two tasks that are typically labeled as “working memory” measures, N-back and Spatial Span, were reliably related to intelligence. Instead, we found that a small number of measures were related to intelligence scores. In a set of 13 measures we did not observe a single “positive manifold” that would indicate a general-ability understanding of intelligence. We tested a wide range of attention and working memory tasks in 7- to 9-year-old children and adults, and we used the results of these cognitive measures to predict intelligence scores. Performance on other capacity-constrained tasks, even those that have typically been given the label of “attention tasks,” may thus also be related to fluid intelligence. These theories focus on domain-general processing capacity limitations, rather than limitations specifically linked to working memory tasks. Much of this work has focused on the relationship between intelligence and working memory, and more specifically between intelligence and the capacity-loading aspects of working memory. Human fluid intelligence emerges from the interactions of various cognitive processes.Īlthough some classic models characterize intelligence as a unitary “general ability,” many distinct lines of research have suggested that it is possible to at least partially decompose intelligence into a set of subsidiary cognitive functions.
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