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Binet’s Error: Developmental Change and Individual Differences in Intelligence Are Related to Different Mechanisms

In common with most, if not all, papers in this special issue, I will argue that understanding the nature of developmental change and individual differences in intelligence requires a theory of the mechanisms underlying both factors. Insofar as these mechanisms constitute part of the fundamental arc...

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Autor principal: Anderson, Mike
Formato: Online Artículo Texto
Lenguaje:English
Publicado: MDPI 2017
Materias:
Acceso en línea:https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6526414/
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/31162415
http://dx.doi.org/10.3390/jintelligence5020024
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author Anderson, Mike
author_facet Anderson, Mike
author_sort Anderson, Mike
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description In common with most, if not all, papers in this special issue, I will argue that understanding the nature of developmental change and individual differences in intelligence requires a theory of the mechanisms underlying both factors. Insofar as these mechanisms constitute part of the fundamental architecture of cognition, this is also an exercise in unifying the discipline and research on intelligence in both children and adults. However, I argue that a variety of data support a theory suggesting that developmental change is the province of mechanisms commonly regarded as components of executive functioning or cognitive control, whereas individual differences are constrained by the speed of information processing. Perhaps paradoxically, this leads to the conclusion that Binet’s fundamental insight—that children’s increasing ability to solve problems of increasing difficulty could generate a single scale of intelligence—is wrong. Compounding the paradox, this means that mental age and IQ are not simply two different ways of expressing the same thing, but are related to two different dimensions of g itself.
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spelling pubmed-65264142019-05-29 Binet’s Error: Developmental Change and Individual Differences in Intelligence Are Related to Different Mechanisms Anderson, Mike J Intell Article In common with most, if not all, papers in this special issue, I will argue that understanding the nature of developmental change and individual differences in intelligence requires a theory of the mechanisms underlying both factors. Insofar as these mechanisms constitute part of the fundamental architecture of cognition, this is also an exercise in unifying the discipline and research on intelligence in both children and adults. However, I argue that a variety of data support a theory suggesting that developmental change is the province of mechanisms commonly regarded as components of executive functioning or cognitive control, whereas individual differences are constrained by the speed of information processing. Perhaps paradoxically, this leads to the conclusion that Binet’s fundamental insight—that children’s increasing ability to solve problems of increasing difficulty could generate a single scale of intelligence—is wrong. Compounding the paradox, this means that mental age and IQ are not simply two different ways of expressing the same thing, but are related to two different dimensions of g itself. MDPI 2017-06-09 /pmc/articles/PMC6526414/ /pubmed/31162415 http://dx.doi.org/10.3390/jintelligence5020024 Text en © 2017 by the author. Licensee MDPI, Basel, Switzerland. This article is an open access article distributed under the terms and conditions of the Creative Commons Attribution (CC BY) license (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/).
spellingShingle Article
Anderson, Mike
Binet’s Error: Developmental Change and Individual Differences in Intelligence Are Related to Different Mechanisms
title Binet’s Error: Developmental Change and Individual Differences in Intelligence Are Related to Different Mechanisms
title_full Binet’s Error: Developmental Change and Individual Differences in Intelligence Are Related to Different Mechanisms
title_fullStr Binet’s Error: Developmental Change and Individual Differences in Intelligence Are Related to Different Mechanisms
title_full_unstemmed Binet’s Error: Developmental Change and Individual Differences in Intelligence Are Related to Different Mechanisms
title_short Binet’s Error: Developmental Change and Individual Differences in Intelligence Are Related to Different Mechanisms
title_sort binet’s error: developmental change and individual differences in intelligence are related to different mechanisms
topic Article
url https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6526414/
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/31162415
http://dx.doi.org/10.3390/jintelligence5020024
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