individual differences in cognition chapter

Question 1

what are the two main components of intelligence listed in the WAIS

Answer 1

verbal intelligence and performance

Question 2

explain verbal intelligence component and how age impacts

Answer 2

-Vocabulary and language comprehension
-Declines only slightly
-With aging, goes up slightly when you are 20, then there is a decline in the later years
-Ability to write, read, and use spoken words

Question 3

explain performance component and age impact

Answer 3

-Reasoning and problem solving
-Includes mathematical oriented kind of things, working memory is important here
-Declines dramatically With aging

Question 4

explain study that highlights older adults and their job performance

Answer 4

Perlmutter et al. (1990)
-Older adults often do better than younger adults on relevant job-related behavior.
-Shows that even though there is performance decline, people can still perform their jobs at a very high level

Question 5

explain the Flynn effect and reasoning why

Answer 5

Flynn (2007)/”Flynn effect” (over the years, average IQ has increased a bit)
-Previous generations did not do as well on tests even when they were young.
-Might be due to differences among generations
-There are some theories about why this is happening, but no one is really sure why: could be the complexity of society, could be easier access to things that make you smarter

Question 6

when do people perform their best work in their professions and two studies about it

Answer 6

Some believe that people in many professions tend to produce their best work in their mid-thirties (Lehman, 1953).
-However, people often maintain high intellectual performance into their forties and fifties.

Working memory and aging (Salthouse, 1992)
-Study: looked at books that were published by philosophers (philosophers tend to write multiple books) and looked at the years the books were published, paid interest which book was the best one, which book became the most famous; found that for most of them the best books were in the person’s 20s and 30s; however people will still able to produce high quality work as they got older

-Study: solved logical problems, requires good working memory to solve these problems; older people with decaying working memory had the hardest things with these problems
-As the questions get more complex everyone gets worse, but the decrease is much bigger for people who are older than people who are younger

Question 7

what are psychometric tests

Answer 7

-Tests of different aspects of an individual’s intellectual performance
-There is not a single dimension of intelligence.

Question 8

explain the history of intelligence testing

Answer 8

-Commission in Paris charged with identifying children in need of remedial attention (1904)
-Alfred Binet developed early IQ test.
-Lewis Terman adapted Binet’s test for American students (1916).
-Stanford-Binet test
-Wechsler for children (wisc) or adults (wais)

Question 9

what is IQ

Answer 9

Intelligent Quotient (IQ)
-A measure of general intellectual performance, which is normed to have a mean of 100 and a standard deviation of 15. (where you stand relevant to everyone else)
-IQ scores are normally distributed through the population.
-Measure someone’s measured age / chronological age, not entire formula, but the main idea

Question 10

what are some controversies about IQ

Answer 10

-The concept of intelligence is culturally relative.
-Some cultures do not even have a definition of intelligence, having a test for it can become controversial, can we develop an intelligence test that is not from the perspective of a particular culture?

Do IQ tests measure innate endowment or acquired ability?
-Seems as though it is a combination of both

-Standardized intelligence tests measure general factors that predict success in school.
-Breast feeding seems to increase IQ
-Brain size correlates with IQ
-Stress seems to be bad for IQ

Question 11

IQ and SES?

Answer 11

Interaction between SES and heredity of IQ (when we are trying to predict IQ from parents), a lot of this is not well understood
-IQ seems much more hereditable for those with high SES
-For those with low SES, environment seems more important

Question 12

IQ and sex?

Answer 12

Not much of a sex difference
-Advantage for women in verbal abilities
-Advantage for males in visuospatial abilities

Question 13

IQ and racial differences? and paper about them.

Answer 13

Racial differences in cognitive ability
-Not there for memory
-They seem to exist for IQ, but they are lessening with time

Flynn Effect (Marks 2010), wrote a paper about why the racial differences occur in IQ
-More sophisticated society?
-Better nutrition?
-Literacy?
-Believes that this is the main factor in the differences in IQ
-Racial disparities
-African Americans about 1 SD lower then European Americans (same thing when you consider different nationalities)

Question 14

explain the literacy hypothesis

Answer 14

-Maybe this is due to literacy rates
-Surprising number of people in US do not have high literacy
-If you can’t read, you can’t excel at IQ tests

Tested:
-Correlation between IQ and literacy
-If literacy is really the reasoning behind IQ, as literacy increases (which it does overtime) so does IQ
-Flynn Effect and racial differences should be more evident in verbal subscales of IQ tests

Question 15

literacy hypothesis and SD and and skewedness

Answer 15

Skewedness and SD of IQ distribution, and Flynn Effect IQ increases should be larger in lower half of IQ distribution
-SD should get smaller over time because those who are low in IQ should be getting less and less, subset with low scores should be going up too and the skewedness should be less negatively skewed as time goes on

Question 16

explain factor analysis and IQ tests

Answer 16

FACTOR ANALYSIS (looks at the way the questions are answered and it looks at what things are correlated with one another, the clusters of questions that are correlated are called factors)
-Statistical method that tries to find a set of factors that will account for performance across a range of tests
-Tests are arranged in a multidimensional space
-Performance on various subtests (measuring IQ) tend to be positively correlated, but less than +1.

Question 17

washington pre college test battery and factor analysis

Answer 17

-Can identify factors within factors
-See that different linguistic subtests are correlated with one another, mathematic subtest are created with one another, spatial subtest is separate (gives you the factors)

Question 18

spearman’s argument for IQ factors

Answer 18

-SPEARMAN (1904) argued that only one general factor underlies performance across tests.
-The g factor (g stands for general), not necessarily right, but there is the case on IQ tests that people who score high on one dimension also score high on the other ones, the dimensions are correlated

Question 19

thurstones and guilford’s arguments

Answer 19

THURSTONE (1938) argued that there were a number of separate factors.
-Verbal, spatial, reasoning

GUILFORD (1956) proposed more than 150 distinct intellectual abilities.

Question 20

Cattel’s distinction between crystallized and fluid intelligence

Answer 20

Crystallized intelligence
-The factor in intelligence that depends on acquired knowledge

Fluid intelligence
-The factor in intelligence that reflects the ability to reason or solve problems in novel domains (when you are in a situation you have never been before)
-Shows age related decay

Question 21

what is Carroll’s theory of IQ with three strata

Answer 21

Surveyed all data sets
-Proposed three-strata theory of intelligence that combines Horn-Cattell and Thurstone:
1) Specific abilities; largely not inheritable
2) Broader abilities:
-verbal factors (crystallized intelligence)
-reasoning factor (fluid intelligence)
-spatial factor
3) Correlated abilities: Spearman’s g

Question 22

tests for reasoning ability?

Answer 22

Typical tests used to measure reasoning ability include math problems, analogies, series extrapolation, deductive syllogisms, and problem solving tasks.

Question 23

study about reasoning ability and analogies and the two steps needed to solve these problems

Answer 23

STERNBERG AND GARDNER (1983)
-Had people process a wide variety of reasoning problems (do an analogy problem, if this is to this, then what is this to?)
-People who score high on reasoning ability are able to perform individual steps of reasoning rapidly. What you are doing in your mind is breaking it down into two steps (discovering what the difference is and then once you have determined that you have to decide between choices and see which one resembles the original analogy)

1) Reasoning parameter
-Recognize the difference
2) Comparison parameter
-Compare the difference to another set of problems

Question 24

study about verbal ability and showing participants two words

Answer 24

Goldberg, Schwartz, and Stewart (1977)
-Showed people sets of words, one condition people had to look at two words and see if they were the same word or not, in the other condition you had to determine if two words sounded the same when you say them, in another group you had to categorize words and see if they have the same meaning or can relate to one another
-Compared people with high verbal ability with those with low verbal ability with on various kinds of word judgments

-Found that people who scored high on verbal IQ did better in all groups, as what you were doing dealt more and more with meaning the difference between high verbal IQ and low verbal IQ got greater and greater
-An advantage of high verbal ability is the speed with which you can go from a linguistic stimuli to information about it

Question 25

what are people with high verbal memory able to do

Answer 25

-Rapidly retrieve meanings of words.
-Have large working memory for verbal information.

Question 26

study about spatial ability and mental rotation

Answer 26

-Research that relates spatial ability to mental rotation ability

JUST AND CARPENTER (1985)
-Examined mental rotation, have to tell if two objects are the same when they are rotated
-Rate of mental rotation is slower for participants with low spatial ability. Still takes people longer to do it with high angular disparity (in both groups, high and low spatial ability), as the thing gets harder and harder the gap between the two groups gets bigger and bigger

Question 27

explain the study comparing verbal ability and spatial ability with negations

Answer 27

Spatial ability is often set in contrast to verbal ability.
-Individual differences in how a cognitive task is solved

MACLEOD, HUNT, AND MATTHEWS (1978)
-Two groups of participants: gave them hard questions, would describe a visual scene and you would be shown the scene and you would tell whether the description you saw was the same as the description you read; people struggle with negations (e.g. naked vs. not clothed, takes us longer to understand what not clothed means)

-Those who took a representation of the sentence and matched it against a picture
-high verbal intelligence and low spatial intelligence

-Those who converted the sentence into an image of a picture and then matched that image against the picture
-high spatial ability and low verbal intelligence

Results: when you had descriptions that had negations, people who were high in spatial reasoning were not affected; people who were high in verbal reasoning were impacted
-People who are spatially inept read the description and turn it into a picture in their head so they can do this task quickly, people who are good verbally do not convert language to spatial image in their brain (the representation they are using is a verbal representation so they get tripped up)
-People who are good at something remain good even when it gets harder, people who are not good at it get worse

Question 28

fMRI study with visualizations

Answer 28

-Used fMRI brain-imaging study (had people do the previous task while they were in an fMRI
-Found that participants engage in more neural effort when required to use a less-favored strategy
-Either told to make a picture from a description or not make a picture from the description they were told; people who were high verbally that were forced to put it in visual form the parietal cortex lights up (spatial reasoning) more than people who were spatially inept (brain is working harder)
-When you have people good spatially that are told to leave things in verbal form the linguistic part of the brain lights up more than people that are good verbally

Question 29

conclusions from chapter

Answer 29

Individual differences in general factors appear to correspond to the speed and ease with which basic cognitive processes are performed.