| The study of intelligence has traditionally consisted of measuring and classifying on the basis of psychometric instruments. These typical conceptions of intelligence are being challenged by cognitive psychologists. They are motivated by the belief that intelligence should be determined by content-free measures, and that the measurement should be dictated by theory. One popular theory is based on the information processing point of view. The thrust of this research has been directed toward isolating the basic processing skills and determining the extent of their relationship to traditional psychometric measures of ability. The effects of intelligence, as measured by the Raven's Progressive Matrices, Set A, A(,B), and B (1975), on performance in a simultaneous matching task were studied. Twenty-eight preschool children were assigned to a high or average intelligence group using a greater-than-the-95th or less-than-the-50th percentile score in the Progressive Matrices, respectively. The cognitive processing task required that the subjects indicate whether the two animals on the screen were the "same" or "different." These judgments were to occur on the basis of either physical or name identity. The difference between the name and physical identity response latencies was taken as a measure of how long it takes subjects to retrieve animal names from long-term memory (encoding). A planned comparison analysis of the data revealed that encoding is more rapid in high intelligence, as compared to average intelligence children. Moreover, the correlation between intelligence and name identity reaction times was -.29. Recommendations included those that had implications for practice and future research. |
