[工程科技]Cognitive and Neurobiological Mechanisms of the Law of General Intelligence.pdfVIP

Cognitive and Neurobiological Mechanisms of the Law of General Intelligence Christopher F. Chabris Department of Psychology Harvard University Cambridge, MA 02138 USA cfc@wj www.wj /~cfc 5 November 2006 To appear as Chapter 19 of: Roberts, M. J. (Ed.) (2006). Integrating the mind: Domain general versus domain spe cif ic pr ocesses in higher cognition. Hove, UK: Psychology Press. Introduction Why do scores on most cognitive ability tests correlate positively? The fact that people who score highly on one test tend to score highly on others—that some people are more intelligent than others—is now so intuitively obvious that most psychologists, at least since it was first discovered by Spearman (1904), take it for granted. They are not interested in talking about, much less thinking about, let alone investigating, individual differences in cognitive ability. And there is nothing wrong with this; research topics and approaches fade in and out of popularity. Even the harshest critics of IQ profess no surprise at the positive correlations among tests; Stephen J. Gould (1981, p. 315) wrote, “The fact of pervasive intercorrelation between mental tests must be among the most unsurprising maj or discoveries in the history of science.” But if we could step out of our normal modes of thinking, if we could free our minds of the “debauchery of learning” that William James famously noted (1890, as quoted by Cosmides Tooby, 1994), we might wonder why there should be any correlation among cognitive tests, let alone the strong, consistent, positive correlations found in hundreds of studies over the past century (Carroll, 1993). Evolutionary psychology, with its emphasis on specialised adaptations and instincts forged in a long-ago stone age, has little to say about current variation in intelligence. Few theories in cognitive psychology specify how their component processes or representations might vary from person to person. Neuroscience likewise gives