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…

Current theories concerning individual differences in working memory capacity (WMC) suggest that WMC reflects the ability to control the focus of attention and resist interference and distraction. The current set of experiments tested whether susceptibility to distraction is partially responsible for the established relationship between…

Sex differences on the Attention Test (AC), the Raven's Standard Progressive Matrices (SPM), and the Brazilian Cognitive Battery (BPR5), were investigated using four large samples (total N=6780), residing in the states of Minas Gerais and Sao Paulo. The majority of samples used, which were obtained from educational settings, could be considered a…

The relation between mental ability and the ability to detect violations of an abstract, third-order conjunction rule was examined using event-related potential measures, specifically mismatch negativity (MMN). The primary objective was to determine whether the extraction of invariant relations based on abstract conjunctions between two…

In the present study, speeded tasks with differing assumed difficulties of the trials are regarded as a special class of simple cognitive tasks. Exploratory latent growth modeling with data-driven shape of a growth curve and nonlinear structured latent curve modeling with predetermined monotonically increasing functions were used to analyze…

This study provides the first direct evidence of cognitive continuity for multiple specific information processing abilities from infancy and toddlerhood to pre-adolescence, and provides support for the view that infant abilities form the basis of later childhood abilities. Data from a large sample of children (N = 131) were obtained at five…

The study investigates the effects of intelligence, perceptual speed and age on intraindividual growth in attentional speed and attentional accuracy over the course of a 6-minute testing session. A sample of 193 subjects completed the Advanced Progressive Matrices and the Vienna Matrices Test representing intelligence, the tests Alertness and…

A latent variable analysis was conducted to examine the nature of individual differences in lapses of attention and their relation to executive and fluid abilities. Participants performed a sustained attention task along with multiple measures of executive control and fluid abilities. Lapses of attention were indexed based on the slowest reaction…

The ranking of Wechsler subtests in terms of their "g" loadings is equivalent to ranking them in terms of the cognitive complexity of the tasks measured. Lower performing groups do not always fall behind higher performing groups the more complex the task. But that is the general rule, no matter whether the cause of the lower performance…

Multitasking performance is relevant in everyday life and job analyses highlight the influence of multitasking over several diverse occupations. Intelligence is the best single predictor of overall job performance and it is also related to individual differences in multitasking. However, it has been shown that working memory capacity (WMC) is…

Measures of broad fluid abilities including verbal, quantitative, and figural reasoning are commonly used in the K-12 school context for a variety of purposes. However, differentiation of these domains is difficult for young children (grades K-2) who lack basic linguistic and mathematical literacy. This study examined the latent factor structure…

Individual differences in mental ability (MA) were examined with event-related potentials (ERP). In addition to using an auditory frequency discrimination task, a duration discrimination task was used to elicit P300 and mismatch negativity (MMN) components of the ERP. Frequency and duration P300 latencies explained 9% and 10% of variance of MAB…

To explore the possible neural foundations of individual differences in intelligence test scores, we examined the associations between Raven's Matrices scores and two tasks that were administered in a functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) setting. The two tasks were an n-back working memory (N = 37) task and inspection time (N = 47). The…

An enduring enterprise of experimental psychology has been to account for individual differences in human performance. Recent advances in neuroimaging have permitted testing of hypotheses regarding the neural bases of individual differences but this burgeoning literature has been characterized by inconsistent results. We argue that careful design…

The contrasting approaches of differential psychology and cognitive psychology to the same individual differences data are outlined. Using data from the Clark and Chase sentence-picture verification task, four loci of conflict between these two disciplines are identified: (1) theory versus measurement; (2) meaningfulness versus reliability; (3)…