Indeed, the most popular formulations of working memory share, at their core, an interaction between memory stores and attention. This area of inquiry is grounded in theories of working memory proposing an interacting set of lower level processes, including the control of attention, that together give rise to short-term maintenance and manipulation of mental representations. Results indicate that working memory capacity is predictive of fluid intelligence, implying a general processing-capacity limitation for both categories of tasks. Researchers have also closely examined the specific aspects of working memory that are most related to fluid intelligence. These research tracks include investigations of the utility of working memory over and above fluid intelligence as a predictor of academic success and the possibility of improving working memory and then observing concomitant improvements in fluid intelligence. These strong correlations between working memory and fluid intelligence have, in turn, led to many distinct lines of research that further probe this relationship. For consistency, we use the label “working memory” here, although we recognize the potential for dissociation between working memory and short-term memory. In particular, when relating these processes to fluid intelligence, there is evidence that distinctions between the two constructs may not be wholly clear (see Methods). The distinctions between working memory and short-term memory have been inconsistent across tasks and theories (e.g. Working memory refers to the short-term maintenance and manipulation of mental information. In particular, high correlations are ubiquitously found between working memory measures and reasoning measures. 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. Furthermore, these patterns were indistinguishable across age groups, indicating a hierarchical cognitive basis of intelligence that is stable from childhood into 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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