Here, intelligence is taken to mean scores from psychometric tests of cognitive functions. This essay describes how cognitive tests offer assessments of brain functioning--an otherwise difficult-to-assess organ--that have proved enduringly useful in the field of health and medicine. The two "consequential world problems" (the phrase used…

To test whether cognitive ability predicts survival from age 79 to 89 years data were collected from 543 (230 male) participants who entered the study at a mean age of 79.1 years. Most had taken the Moray House Test of general intelligence (MHT) when aged 11 and 79 years from which, in addition to intelligence measures at these two time points,…

Childhood intelligence (age 11) and occupational social status at midlife (age 46 to 51) was associated with marital status and reproduction in a sample from the Aberdeen Children of the 1950s cohort study (N = 9614). Male and female divorcees had lower childhood intelligence test scores than their married counterparts, but no meaningful…

Though mental ability tends to be relatively stable throughout the lifespan, many still argue that late life cognitive function largely reflects education, social class, and environmental circumstances. Instead, it may be that early life cognitive function contributes to each of these in turn, as well as to late life cognitive function. This paper…

Intelligence is an important indicator of physical, mental and social well-being. In old age, intelligence is also associated with a higher quality of life and better health. Heritability studies have shown that there are strong genetic influences, yet unknown, on intelligence, including in old age. Other approaches may be useful to investigate…

Here we reprint, and provide background and a commentary on, a recently-rediscovered lecture by Godfrey H. Thomson entitled, "Intelligence and civilisation." It was delivered at the University of Manchester, UK, on 23rd October, 1936, printed in 1937 in the short-lived "Journal of the University of Manchester" and as a pamphlet…

The extent to which visual function, measured as near and distant visual acuity and contrast sensitivity, is correlated with concurrently measured cognitive function and prior intellectual ability was investigated in a narrow age range group known as the Lothian Birth Cohort of 1921 (LBC1921). Participants were aged approximately 83 years at the…

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…

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…

Three prominent theories of intelligence, the Cattell-Horn-Carroll (CHC), extended fluid-crystallized (Gf-Gc) and verbal-perceptual-image rotation (VPR) theories, provide differing descriptions of the structure of intelligence (McGrew, 2009; Horn & Blankson, 2005; Johnson & Bouchard, 2005b). To compare these theories, models representing them were…

Professor Sir Godfrey Thomson is one of the key foundational actors in the history of the educational sciences in the UK. At a time when educational studies and the study of educational psychology were very closely linked, in the decades of the mid-twentieth century, Thomson was a crucial figure in education research. He is known for his work on…

Little is known about the association between measured intelligence and how people participate in democratic processes. In the 1970 British Cohort Study, we examined the association between childhood intelligence and, at age 34: whether and how people voted in the 2001 UK general election; how they intended to vote; and whether they had taken part…

People with higher general cognitive ability in early life have more favourable levels of cardiovascular disease (CVD) risk factors in adulthood and CVD itself. The mechanism of these associations is not known. Here we examine whether general cognitive ability and CVD risk factors share genetic and/or environmental aetiology. In this large,…

In a birth cohort of 6281 men from Aberdeen, Scotland, social class of origin, childhood intelligence, childhood behavior disturbance and education were examined as predictors of status attainment in midlife (46 to 51 years). Social class of origin, intelligence and behavior disturbance were conceptualized as correlated predictors, whose effects…

In longitudinal studies data is collected in a series of waves. Each wave after the first suffers from attrition. Therefore it can be difficult to discriminate between changes in sample parameters due to a longitudinal process (e.g. ageing) and changes due to attrition. The problem is particularly vexing if one of the purposes is to compare…