FEATURE ARTICLE
The Role of Intelligence in Modern Society
Are social changes dividing us into intellectual haves and have-nots? The question pushed aside in the 1970s is back, and the issues are far from simple
Earl Hunt
The Cognitive-Psychology View
Cognitive psychologists think of thinking as the process of creating a mental representation of the current problem, retrieving information that appears relevant and manipulating the representation in order to obtain an answer. The problem, its solution and some of the methods used to solve it are then stored for later reference. The key point in this process is creating the representation. This is assumed to require a temporary, working memory capability, which requires attention and is often a bottleneck in thought. When familiar problems are encountered the process of building an appropriate representation becomes more efficient, because previously acquired information and problem solving techniques can be used. This reduces the demand on working memory, but does not entirely eliminate it.
The cognitive-psychology view is that cognition is a process, whereas the psychometric view makes it a collection of abilities. Perhaps because it is more dynamic, the cognitive-psychology view is often seen as more appealing than the psychometric view, but it has the disadvantage of not lending itself to easy summarization. When cognitive psychologists try to characterize
a person's thinking, they are not likely to use numbers to place the person in a "mental space" defined by factors derived from IQ testing. Instead they frequently use analogies to computing systems. To solve problems a computing system must have sufficient "number crunching" power to attack the problem at hand, programs that are appropriate for solving the problems the system faces, and access to the data required to solve these problems. Cognitive psychology draws an analogy between computing
power, programs and data access, and the cognitive functions of being able to process ideas?any ideas?quickly and accurately, knowing how to solve certain classes of problems, and having access to the knowledge needed to
solve particular problems. In psychological terms, human number-crunching is a physiological capacity, whereas knowing how to solve problems and knowing key facts are both products of learning. Each of these aspects of thought
are legitimate parts of intelligence. The physiological capacities are clearly part of Gf, knowing key facts is part of Gc, and having acquired certain
problem-solving strategies is a bit of both Gc and Gf. A person's capabilities are determined by the interaction between power, knowledge of how to use that power and access to required data.
The cognitive-psychology account complements the psychometric distinction between fluid and crystallized intelligence. Both accounts stress how a novice's performance depends on the ability to develop new problem representations (Cattell and Horn's fluid intelligence) and how with experience one shifts from problem representation to pattern recognition, by applying past solutions to present problems. Since developing a representation is more demanding of working memory and attention than pattern recognition is, learning to do an intellectual task will generally be harder than doing it. The theory also implies that people who do well on tests of fluid intelligence should have a large working-memory capacity, and indeed, they do (Carpenter, Just and Shell 1990).
When cognition is viewed this way it is not surprising that IQ tests, and especially fluid-intelligence tests, are associated with academic performance. By definition students are novices. So are apprentices in workplace settings. Data from the military (Wigdor and Green 1991) have shown that performance on the Armed Forces Qualification Test (AFQT), which is used to screen military
recruits, has a strong relation with performance on the job in the first few months. After two years the relation is reduced, but not negligible. Similarly, the Department of Labor's General Aptitude Test Battery (GATB) has been shown to be less valid for older than for younger workers. This
is consistent with laboratory studies and theoretical analyses in cognitive psychology, all of which show that the experience reduces but does not eliminate the relation between general intelligence and performance (Ackerman 1987).
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