Intelligence g Factor/Jensen: PSYC Call for Multiple Book Reviewers

PSYCOLOQUY CALL FOR BOOK REVIEWERS Below is the Abstract of the Precis of "The g Factor" by Arthur Jensen. This book has been selected for multiple review in PSYCOLOQUY. If you wish to submit a formal book review please write to psyc(a)pucc.princeton.edu indicating what expertise you would bring to bear on reviewing the book if you were selected to review it. (If you have never reviewed for PSYCOLOQUY or Behavioral & Brain Sciences before, it would be helpful if you could also append a copy of your CV to your inquiry.) If you are selected as one of the reviewers and do not have a copy of the book, you will be sent a copy of the book directly by the publisher (please let us know if you have a copy already). Reviews may also be submitted without invitation, but all reviews will be refereed. The author will reply to all accepted reviews. The Full Precis of the book is available at these URLs (bot note that the Reviews are to be of the BOOK, not the Precis: : http://www.cogsci.soton.ac.uk/cgi/psyc/newpsy?10.023 or ftp://ftp.princeton.edu/pub/harnad/Psycoloquy/1999.volume.10/ psyc.99.10.023.intelligence-g-factor.1.jensen Full Psycoloquy book review instructions at: http://www.princeton.edu/~harnad/psyc.html http://www.cogsci.soton.ac.uk/psycoloquy/ Relevant excerpts: Psycoloquy reviews are of the book not the Precis. Length should be about 200 lines [c. 1800 words], with a short abstract (about 50 words), an indexable title, and reviewer's full name and institutional address, email and Home Page URL. All references that are electronically accessible should also have URLs. AUTHOR'S RATIONALE FOR SOLICITING COMMENTARY The g factor arises from the empirical fact that scores on a large variety of independently designed tests of extremely diverse cognitive abilities all turn out to be positively correlated with one another. The g factor appears to be a biological property of the brain, highly correlated with measures of information-processing efficiency, such as working memory capacity, choice and discrimination reaction times, and perceptual speed. It is highly heritable and has many biological correlates, including brain size, evoked potentials, nerve conduction velocity, and cerebral glucose metabolic rate during cognitive activity. It remains to investigate and explain its neurobiological basis. Commentary is invited from psychometricians, statisticians, geneticists, neuropsychologists, psychophysiologists, cognitive modellers, evolutionary psychologists and other specialties concerned with cognitive abilities, their measurement, and their cognitive and neurobiological basis. psycoloquy.023.intelligence-g-factor.1.jensen Wed Sep 15 1999 ISSN 1055-0143 (70 paragraphs, 12 references, 905 lines) PSYCOLOQUY is sponsored by the American Psychological Association (APA) Copyright 1999 Arthur Jensen Precis of : THE G FACTOR: THE SCIENCE OF MENTAL ABILITY [Praeger, 1998 xiv + 648 pp. ISBN 0-275-96103-6 ISSN 1063-2158] Arthur R. Jensen Graduate School of Education University of California, Berkeley Nesnejar(a)aol.com ABSTRACT: The g factor is the highest-order common factor that can be extracted in a hierarchical factor analysis from a large battery of diverse tests of various cognitive abilities. It is the most important psychometric construct in the study of individual differences in human cognitive abilities. Since its discovery by Spearman in 1904, the g factor has become so firmly established as a major psychological construct in terms of psychometric and factor analytic criteria that further research along these lines is very unlikely either to disconfirm the construct validity of g or to add anything essentially new to our understanding of it. In fact, g, unlike any of the primary, or first-order, factors revealed by factor analysis, cannot be described in terms of the knowledge content of cognitive test items, or in terms of skills, or even in terms of theoretical cognitive processes. It is not essentially a psychological or behavioral variable, but a biological one, a property of the brain. But although not itself a cognitive ability, g is what causes positive correlations among individual differences in performance, even on cognitive tasks that differ greatly with respect to sensory motor modality, brain modularity, and learned cognitive skills and knowledge. The g factor derived from conventional nonspeeded psychometric tests shows higher correlations than any other factors independent of g with various measures of information-processing efficiency, such as working memory capacity, choice and discrimination reaction times, and perceptual speed. A test's g loading is the best predictor of its heritability and its sensitivity to inbreeding depression. Psychometric g also has more direct biological correlates than any other independent source of test variance, for example brain size, brain evoked potentials, nerve conduction velocity, and the brain's glucose metabolic rate during cognitive activity. The ultimate arbiter among various "theories of intelligence" must be the physical properties of the brain itself. The current frontier of g research is the investigation of the anatomical and physiological features of the brain that cause g. Research has reached the point at which the only direction left in which to go is that presaged by Spearman himself, who wrote that the final understanding of g must "come from the most profound and detailed direct study of the human brain in its purely physical and chemical aspects" (1927, p.403). KEYWORDS: behavior genetics, cognitive modelling, evoked potentials, evolutionary psychology, factor analysis, g factor, heritability, individual differences, intelligence, IQ, neurometrics, psychometrics, psychophyiology, skills, Spearman, statistics The Full Precis of the book is available at these URLs (bot note that the Reviews are to be of the BOOK, not the Precis: : http://www.cogsci.soton.ac.uk/cgi/psyc/newpsy?10.023 or ftp://ftp.princeton.edu/pub/harnad/Psycoloquy/1999.volume.10/ psyc.99.10.023.intelligence-g-factor.1.jensen Full Psycoloquy book review instructions at: http://www.princeton.edu/~harnad/psyc.html http://www.cogsci.soton.ac.uk/psycoloquy/ Relevant excerpts: Psycoloquy reviews are of the book not the Precis. Length should be about 200 lines [c. 1800 words], with a short abstract (about 50 words), an indexable title, and reviewer's full name and institutional address, email and Home Page URL. All references that are electronically accessible should also have URLs.