The Mental Speed-IQ Relationship: Unitary or Modular?.

Abstract In his “specificity of mind” view, Ceci (1990a) asserted that mental speed-IQ relationships are only due to their sharing of a common knowledge base. According to the contrasting “singularity of mind” view, the mental speed-IQ correlation should reflect general intelligence. We tested these two views by letting 120 participants perform a battery of paper-and-pencil elementary cognitive tests (ECTs): a modified version of Lindley's Coding Test and two newly developed paper-and-pencil tests following the rationales of the Sternberg and the Posner paradigms. Three versions of each of these ECTs involving different knowledge bases (verbal, numerical, and figural) were devised. Intelligence tests employed were Raven's Advanced Progressive Matrices and the Berlin model of Intelligence Structure (BIS). In the bimodal BIS, three content-based components (verbal, numerical, figural), four operational components (processing speed, memory, creativity, processing capacity), and a general factor are operationalized. We obtained three main results: First, as expected, high speed of information processing in ECTs is related to high psychometric intelligence. Second, there is only weak evidence for ECT-intelligence correlations with the same content to be largest, which rather supports the singularity of mind view. Third, regarding the operational components in the BIS, mental speed in ECTs correlates most highly with the processing speed component, followed by the processing capacity component. Less prominent but still significant correlations resulted for the memory and creativity components.

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