Although lifespan changes in cognitive performance and Flynn effects have both been well documented, there has been little scientific focus to date on the net effect of these forces on cognition at the population level. Two major questions moving beyond this finding guided this study: (1) Does the Flynn effect indeed continue in the 2000s for…

Previous research has established convincingly that there is a strong positive relation between educational attainment and trust. There is less agreement however, about the precise determinants of this relation. In this article, we assess how education is related to generalized and political trust, controlling for cognitive ability and…

Many aspects of cognition decline from middle to late adulthood, but the dimensionality and generality of this decline have rarely been examined. We analyzed 20-year longitudinal data of 6203 middle-aged to very old adults from Greater Manchester and Newcastle-upon-Tyne, UK. Participants were assessed up to eight times on 20 tasks of fluid…

The idea that information processing speed is related to cognitive ability has a long history. Much evidence has been amassed in its support, with respect to both individual differences in general intelligence and developmental trajectories. Two so-called elementary cognitive tasks, reaction time and inspection time, have been used to compile this…

The relationships between processing speed, intelligence, and school achievement were analyzed on a sample of 184 Russian 16-year-old students. Two speeded tasks required the discrimination of simple geometrical shapes and the recognition of the presented meaningless figures. Raven's Advanced Progressive Matrices and the verbal subtests of…

It has been reported that the ability to solve syllogisms is highly "g"-loaded. In the present study, using a self-administered shortened version of a syllogism-solving test, the "BAROCO Short," we examined whether robust findings generated by previous research regarding IQ scores were also applicable to "BAROCO…

In this study, cross-cultural differences in cognitive test scores are hypothesized to depend on a test's cultural complexity (Cultural Complexity Hypothesis: CCH), here conceptualized as its content familiarity, rather than on its cognitive complexity (Spearman's Hypothesis: SH). The content familiarity of tests assessing short-term memory,…

A large number of studies have reported average performance differences in favor of males in mental rotation tasks. However, it is still unclear to what extent the magnitude of the sex differences varies across age, and whether the differences increase with age. In this study, we reanalyzed data from a cross-sectional investigation of N = 1624…

Tested 133 college students in Germany with new tasks and 6 working memory marker tasks. Results reveal three working memory functions: simultaneous storage and processing; supervision; and coordination of elements into structures. Each function could be subdivided into distinct components of variance. (SLD)

The relationship between forward and backward digit span and basic cognitive processes was examined. Subjects were administered measures of sequential processing, simultaneous processing, and planning. Correlational analyses indicated the serial processing character of forward digit span, and the relationship between backward digit span and…

A study with 179 Australian college students casts doubts on the usefulness of the theoretical model of human information processing postulated by S. Lehrl and B. Fischer (1990). Instead of reflecting properties of a limited capacity system, the Basic Unit of Information Processing (BIP) seems to be a marker for reading speed. (SLD)

Studied the contribution of preattentive processes to the cognitive speed-ability relationship for 80 participants. Results reveal an increase in ability-related variances due to the stimulation of preattentive processes. Coefficients for a structural equation model indicated that preattentive processes exerted a stronger effect on cognitive…

Speed of information processing was examined in relation to fluid and crystallized intelligence in sixth graders. Reaction time parameters (except slope) were negatively correlated with scores on intelligence tasks. Partial correlations failed to support any causal relationship between fluid and crystallized intelligence in either direction.…

Administered 2 elementary cognitive task (ECT) tests and 2 psychometric intelligence tests to 169 monozygotic and 131 dizygotic pairs of twins in Germany. Reaction times correlated negatively with psychometric intelligence, and habitability estimates were substantial for both psychometric intelligence and reaction times on the ECTs. Multivariate…

Two groups of reading-disabled (RD) children were compared with controls (age- and IQ-matched competent readers), on a serial running memory task. RD children performed reliably worse than their controls due to an inability to encode serial items in the form of serial phonological patterns. (Author/RD)