Abstract
Many areas of psychology assume that performance on tasks of interest is stable through time. Here, using time-sensitive modeling of working memory task performance, we show not only was this assumption incorrect, but that certain components of the performance trajectory (e.g., final task performance; rate of change) were independently predictive of fluid intelligence. This fact has clear implications for theoretical frameworks linking working memory and fluid intelligence, and beyond.
Highlights
METHODSOverview Procedures were approved by the UW–Madison Institutional Review Board, and all participants provided informed consent prior to participation
Many theories in experimental psychology are paradigmatically grounded in inferences derived from participants’ performance aggregated across many trials of one or more tasks
A second possibility is related to the idea that Gf reflects “the ability to learn”[4,5,6,7]. This might predict that correlations would be observed between Gf scores and the rate of change in working memory (WM) performance
Summary
Overview Procedures were approved by the UW–Madison Institutional Review Board, and all participants provided informed consent prior to participation. Two types of tasks were completed in a dimly-lit room by each participant (recruited from Introduction to Psychology courses; n = 87, mage = 19.1 years, sdage = 0.73, 50 female; see Supplementary Fig. 1). Gf scores were calculated by independently z-scoring, and averaging the percent correct, on two measures of matrix reasoning[10,11]. WM was assessed using 68 trials of a digitized forward spatial span similar to a Corsi-block-tapping task (note that some participants received explicit feedback on this task while others did not; this confirmed the robustness of our results to feedback-related factors). Tasks were presented in an Internet browser using Qualtrics
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