J. Intell., Volume 8, Issue 3 (September 2020) – 8 articles

The ability to accurately judge others’ personality and the ability to accurately recognize others’ emotions are both part of the broader construct of interpersonal accuracy (IPA). However, little research has examined the association between these two IPA domains. Little is also known about the relationship between personality judgment accuracy and other socio-emotional skills and traits. In the present study, 121 participants judged eight traits (Big Five, intelligence, cooperativeness, and empathy) in each of 30 targets who were presented either in a photograph, a muted video, or a video with sound. The videos were 30 second excerpts from negotiations that the targets had engaged in. Participants also completed standard tests of emotion recognition ability, emotion understanding, and trait emotional intelligence. Results showed that personality judgment accuracy, when indexed as trait accuracy and distinctive profile accuracy, positively correlated with emotion recognition ability and was unrelated to emotion understanding and trait emotional intelligence. Female participants were more accurate in judging targets’ personality than men. These results provide support for IPA as a set of correlated domain-specific skills and encourage further research on personality judgment accuracy as a meaningful individual difference variable. Full article

In comparison to young adults, middle-aged and old people show lower scores in intelligence tests and slower response times in elementary cognitive tasks. Whether these well-documented findings can both be attributed to a general cognitive slow-down across the life-span has become subject to debate in the last years. The drift diffusion model can disentangle three main process components of binary decisions, namely the speed of information processing, the conservatism of the decision criterion and the non-decision time (i.e., time needed for processes such as encoding and motor response execution). All three components provide possible explanations for the association between response times and age. We present data from a broad study using 18 different response time tasks from three different content domains (figural, numeric, verbal). Our sample included people between 18 to 62 years of age, thus allowing us to study age differences across young-adulthood and mid-adulthood. Older adults generally showed longer non-decision times and more conservative decision criteria. For speed of information processing, we found a more complex pattern that differed between tasks. We estimated mediation models to investigate whether age differences in diffusion model parameters account for the negative relation between age and intelligence, across different intelligence process domains (processing capacity, memory, psychometric speed) and different intelligence content domains (figural, numeric, verbal). In most cases, age differences in intelligence were accounted for by age differences in non-decision time. Content domain-general, but not content domain-specific aspects of non-decision time were related to age. We discuss the implications of these findings on how cognitive decline and age differences in mental speed might be related. Full article

Transfer of learning, the application of learning to different contexts over time, is important to all learning for development. As 21st century skills specifically aim to be “generic,” there is an assumption that they can be transferred from context to context. We investigate the process of transfer in problem solving, with specific focus on mathematical problem solving tasks. Problem solving is highly valued in 21st century workplaces, where mathematical skills are also considered to be foundational in STEM and of paramount importance. This study examines the transfer of first semester mathematics learning to problem solving in second semester physics at university. We report on: (1) university students’ (n = 10) “think-aloud” accounts of the process of transfer; and (2) students’ (n = 10) and academics’ (n = 8) perspectives on transfer processes and problem solving. Think-aloud accounts show students’ recursive use of interpretation, integration, planning and execution thinking processes and highlight the meta-cognitive strategies used in transfer. Academics’ and students’ perspectives on transfer show disparities. Understanding these perspectives is important to current initiatives to integrate and optimise 21st century learning within universities. We argue that renewed attention on the concept of transfer is needed if the generic aims of 21st century skills are to be understood and promoted. Full article

David C. Geary proposed the efficiency of mitochondrial processes, especially the production of energy, as the most fundamental biological mechanism contributing to individual differences in general intelligence (g). While the efficiency of mitochondrial functioning is undoubtedly an important and highly interesting factor, I outline several reasons why other main factors of neuroenergetics should not be neglected and why a systems biology perspective should be adopted. There are many advantages for research on intelligence to focus on individual differences in the capability of the overall brain metabolism system to produce the energy currency adenosine triphosphate (ATP): higher predictive strength than single mechanisms, diverse possibilities for experimental manipulation, measurement with existing techniques and answers to unresolved questions because of multiple realizability. Many of these aspects are especially important for research on developmental processes and the building and refining of brain networks for adaptation. Focusing too much on single parts of the system, like the efficiency of mitochondrial functioning, carries the danger of missing important information about the role of neuroenergetics in intelligence and valuable research opportunities. Full article

The last series of Raven’s standard progressive matrices (SPM-LS) test was studied with respect to its psychometric properties in a series of recent papers. In this paper, the SPM-LS dataset is analyzed with regularized latent class models (RLCMs). For dichotomous item response data, an alternative estimation approach based on fused regularization for RLCMs is proposed. For polytomous item responses, different alternative fused regularization penalties are presented. The usefulness of the proposed methods is demonstrated in a simulated data illustration and for the SPM-LS dataset. For the SPM-LS dataset, it turned out the regularized latent class model resulted in five partially ordered latent classes. In total, three out of five latent classes are ordered for all items. For the remaining two classes, violations for two and three items were found, respectively, which can be interpreted as a kind of latent differential item functioning. Full article

Geary (2018, 2019) suggested that heritable and environmentally caused differences in mitochondrial functioning affect the integrity and efficiency of neurons and supporting glia cells and may thus contribute to individual differences in higher-order cognitive functioning and physical health. In our comment, we want to pose three questions aimed at different aspects of Geary’s theory that critically evaluate his theory in the light of evidence from neurocognitive, cognitive enhancement, and behavioral genetics research. We question (1) if Geary’s theory explains why certain cognitive processes show a stronger age-related decline than others; (2) if intervention studies in healthy younger adults support the claim that variation in mitochondrial functioning underlies variation in human intelligence; and (3) if predictions arising from the matrilineal heredity of mitochondrial DNA are supported by behavioral genetics research. We come to the conclusion that there are likely many more biological and social factors contributing to variation in human intelligence than mitochondrial functioning. Full article

Using the comparative approach, researchers draw inferences about the evolution of cognition. Psychologists have postulated several hypotheses to explain why certain species are cognitively more flexible than others, and these hypotheses assume that certain cognitive skills are linked together to create a generally “smart” species. However, empirical findings suggest that several animal species are highly specialized, showing exceptional skills in single cognitive domains while performing poorly in others. Although some cognitive skills may indeed overlap, we cannot a priori assume that they do across species. We argue that the term “cognition” has often been used by applying an anthropocentric viewpoint rather than a biocentric one. As a result, researchers tend to overrate cognitive skills that are human-like and assume that certain skills cluster together in other animals as they do in our own species. In this paper, we emphasize that specific physical and social environments create selection pressures that lead to the evolution of certain cognitive adaptations. Skills such as following the pointing gesture, tool-use, perspective-taking, or the ability to cooperate evolve independently from each other as a concrete result of specific selection pressures, and thus have appeared in distantly related species. Thus, there is not “one cognition”. Our argument is founded upon traditional Darwinian thinking, which—although always at the forefront of biology—has sometimes been neglected in animal cognition research. In accordance with the biocentric approach, we advocate a broader empirical perspective as we are convinced that to better understand animal minds, comparative researchers should focus much more on questions and experiments that are ecologically valid. We should investigate nonhuman cognition for its own sake, not only in comparison to the human model. Full article