The cognitive determinants of number series completion performance were studied by presenting a systematic set of problems to college adults and to average-and high-IQ elementary-school children. In each group a combination of process and content-knowledge variables accounted for more than 10% of the variance in solution difficulty. Solution difficulty was most affected by the amount of information to be coordinated in working memory while assembling and applying the pattern description rule for the sequence. Adults could effectively coordinate more information than children, but IQ levels did not differ on this component ability. Skill in dealing with unusual, hierarchical relations and arithmetic computation also affected performance and discriminated between age and IQ levels. Comparisons with results from other types of rule-induction tasks suggested some general abilities of importance to rule induction.Factor analytic studies have regularly identified rule induction as a central component of tests of academic aptitude (e.g.,
In this study, we investigated bases for encoding linguistic stimuli in short-term memory. Past research has provided evidence for both phonological (sound-based) and cherological (sign-based) encoding, the former typically found with hearing subjects and the latter with deaf users of sign language. In the present experiment, encoding capabilities were delineated from encoding preferences, using 58 subjects comprising six groups differing in hearing ability and linguistic experience. Phonologically related, cherologically related, and control lists were presented orally, manually, or through both modalities simultaneously. Recall performance indicated that individuals encode flexibly, the code actually used being biased by incoming stimulus characteristics. Subjects with both sign and speech experience recalled simultaneous presentations better than ones presented orally or manually alone, which reveals the occurrence of enhanced encoding as a function of linguistic experience. Total linguistic experience appeared to determine recall accuracy following different types of encoding, rather than determining the encoding basis used.
The cognitive determinants of number analogy performance were studied by systematically manipulating the processing demands imposed by the items. To explore sources of developmental differences in analogical reasoning, subjects were included from two age levels, upper elementary school and college. To allow the investigation of individual differences in reasoning ability, the elementary school children were selected to represent two general aptitude levels, average IQ and high 1Q. In each group a combination of process and content knowledge factors accounted for more than 70% of the variance in item solution difficulty. The most, critical processing demand affecting successful performance was the amount of solution-related information to be assembled and managed in working memory. Process and content-knowledge factors differentiated adults from children, whereas only specific, factual knowledge competencies seemed to differentiate between IQ levels in children.Efforts to understand the nature of academic intelligence (Neisser, 1976) have increasingly shifted to analyses of the cognitive determinants of intelligence-test performance (e.g., Hunt, 1978;Pellegrino & Glaser, 1979;Sternberg, 1979). Attempts have been made to specify models of performance on intelligence-test tasks and to use such models as the basis of analyses of age and skill differences. The present study is an attempt to understand academic intelligence more completely by examining process and content-knowledge requirements of perfor-This article is based on the first author's doctoral dissertation submitted to the University of Pittsburgh.
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