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Essay on Memory, Thinking and Intelligence
Nearly 100 years ago, psychologist Charles Spearman noted that individuals tend to do consistently well or poorly on challenging problems from a variety of mental tests. He used scores on those items to calculate a general intelligence factor, or g, which mental testers now view as the basic element of IQ. Spearman argued that g taps into the brain's fundamental intellectual capacity. Mental tasks that are closely allied to general intelligence engage specific parts of the brain's frontal lobe. This relatively restricted frontal-brain network may orchestrate responses to diverse mental challenges. The more difficult tasks, such as discerning which of four sets of abstract shapes subtly differs from the others, are closely related to g. Easier tasks, such as identifying a shape that obviously does not match three others, has only a weak association to g.
Spearman (1904) introduced the construct of general intelligence (g) to describe the common variance shared by a battery of cognitive tests. Usually represented as the first unrotated principal component in a factor analysis of a test battery, Spearman's g routinely accounts for around 50% of the total variance in scores from cognitive tests.
Although the topic of considerable scientific and societal debate, g has endured as a viable scientific phenomenon and is compatible with most psychometric theories of intelligence. In The Abilities of Man, Spearman (1927) noted that correlations between test scores vary according to intellectual ability, with correlations being higher among individuals with low IQ than among those with high IQ. Spearman remarked: “Now, all the changes we have been considering follow a general rule. The correlations always become smaller--showing the influence of g on any ability to grow less--in just the classes of person which, on the whole, possess this g more abundantly. The rule is, then, that the more "energy"....................
