Speed of Cognitive Processing: Cross-Cultural Findings

Abstract

Individual differences (IDs) in mental speed, or speed of cognitive processing have attracted increasing interest in the field of intelligence research during the past decade. Many contemporary British writers consider IDs in mental speed to be a possible secondary manifestation of underlying biological processes in the working brain (Brand & Dreary, 1982; Eysenck, 1982; A.E. Hendrickson, 1982; D.E. Hendrickson, 1982). While this view is shared by some prominent researchers across the Atlantic (Jensen, 1982; Vernon, 1983) American scholars are chiefly interested in IDs in speed of cognitive processing as a means of delineating different information-processing components predicted from cognitive models of task performance (Carroll, 1976, 1980; Hunt, 1978, 1979; Sternberg, 1977, 1980). Interestingly, within both the biological reductionist and the cognitivist information-processing approaches, it is assumed, whether explicitly or implicitly, that the elementary performance constructs indexed by speed measures are invariant across cultural contexts, i.e. that they represent pan human universals. The need for empirical justification of this assumption has been accorded a surprisingly low priority by programme leaders in the field. This seems particularly disconcerting when it is recognised that different researchers are working at different levels of analysis spanning a continuum of information-processing complexity. The possibility of contextually mediated influences on task performance, and hence on construct definition, must be assumed to increase with increasing task complexity.