The Institute of Cognitive Neuroscience and Psychology, Hungarian Academy of Sciences (MTA-TTK-KPI) invites you to its next talk by

Kristóf Kovács, Eszterházy Károly Egyetem

Date: Friday, January 20. 2017. 14:00-15:30

Location: MTA-TTK-KPI, Magyar tudósok körútja 2., room D4.09C

Title: Process Overlap Theory: A new model of the general factor of intelligence

Abstract: One of the most replicated results in psychology is that people who perform better on one kind of mental ability test tend to perform better on other kinds of tests as well. This result is called the positive manifold, and is usually described with a general factor, psychometric g. g, in turn, is usually identified with ‘psychological g’: a domain-general, within-individual cognitive mechanism, usually called 'general intelligence' or 'general cognitive ability’. This interpretation of g, however, does not sit well with a number of phenomena in cognitive psychology and neuroscience: double dissociations, localization data, and patterns of sex differences all contradict the existence of a general cognitive ability. Moreover, despite more than a century of research, there is still no consensus about the nature of psychological g. That is, no unitary biological or psychological origin of psychometric g has been found, and all possible candidates (e.g. brain size, speed of information processing, etc.) have been found insufficient.

An alternative explanation, process overlap theory, is proposed, which is based on a cognitive theory of overlapping item response processes. The theory draws heavily on the empirical finding that the positive manifold is not confined to covariance matrices of the intelligence literature: it is also commonly observed when a battery of working memory tasks is administered to a large group of subjects. As a result, a general factor of working memory capacity can also be extracted, despite working memory being a multi-component system. Process overlap theory assumes that any item or task requires a number of domain-specific as well as domain-general cognitive processes and their corresponding neural mechanisms. Domain-general processes involved in executive attention, and mainly tapping the dorsolateral prefrontal cortex, are activated by a large number of test items, alongside with domain-specific processes tapped by specific types of tests only. Such an overlap of executive processes explains the positive manifold as well as the hierarchical structure of cognitive abilities. The theory also accounts for a number of other, previously unexplained phenomena in differential psychology, such as the central role of fluid inductive reasoning in cognitive abilities or the higher across-domain variance in low ability groups (differentiation). Since process overlap theory provides an explanation of psychometric g in terms of multiple item response processes, it can be translated to a multidimensional item response model, thus abridging psychometrics and cognitive psychology.

The theory also re-interprets the concept of 'IQ' as an index variable, representing different abilities, rather than as the reflection of a unitary 'intelligence'.

Endre Takács

junior research fellow

MTA-TTK-KPI 

tel: +36 1 3826 816