General and Specific Mental Abilities

Description

The history of testing mental abilities has seen the dominance of two contrasting approaches, psychometrics and neuropsychology. These two traditions have different theories and methodologies, but overlap considerably in the tests they use. Historically, psychometrics has emphasized the primacy of a general factor, while neuropsychology has emphasized specific abilities that are dissociable. This issue about the nature of human mental abilities is important for many practical concerns. Questions such as gender, ethnic, and age-related differences in mental abilities are relatively easy to address if they are due to a single dominant trait. Presumably such a trait can be measured with any collection of complex cognitive tests. If there are many specific mental abilities, these would be much harder to measure and associated social issues would be more difficult to resolve. The relative importance of general and specific abilities also has implications for educational practices. This book includes the diverse opinions of experts from several fields including psychometrics, neuropsychology, speech language and hearing, and applied psychology. Dedication Contents Preface List of Contributors 1 A Brief History of Theory and Testing of General and Specific Mental Abilities • Dennis J McFarland 2 General and Specific Intelligence Attributes in the Two-Factor Theory: A Historical Review • Alexander Beaujean 3 Cognitive Ability: Psychometric Perspectives on the Importance of General Mental Ability • Kevin R. Murphy 4 Psychometric Issues Pertaining to the Measurement of Specific Cognitive Abilities • Kara M. Styck 5 The Network Approach to General Intelligence • Han L. I. van der Maas, Alexander O. Savi, Abe Hofman, Kees-Jan Kan, & Maarten Marsman 6 Process Overlap Theory: How the Interplay between Specific and General Mental Abilities Accounts for the Positive Manifold in Intelligence • Kristof Kovacs 7 PASS Theory of Intelligence: A Frozen Dinner or a Moving Feast? • George K. Georgiou & J. P. Das 8 An Overlap between Mental Abilities and Temperament Traits • Irina Trofimova 9 Theoretical Challenges for Differentiating General and Specific Abilities • Harrison Kell 10 Within-Individual Variability of Ability and Learning Trajectories in Complex Problems • Damian P. Birney, Jens F. Beckmann & Nadin Beckmann 11 Modeling General and Specific Mental Abilities • Dennis J McFarland 12 Intelligence and Executive Function: Can we Reunite these Disparate Worlds? • Jose Maria Ruiz Sanchez de Leon, M. Angeles Quiroga, and Roberto Colom 13 Speannan's Law of Diminishing Returns and its Implications for Theories of General Intelligence and Intelligence Testing • Moritz Breit, Martin Brunner and Franzis Preckel 14 Diminished 'g': Fluid and Crystallized Intelligence and Cognitive Abilities linked to Sensory Modalities • Lazar Stankov 15 Auditory Processing Abilities and Disorders • Dennis J McFarland 16 Applications of Psychometric Methods to Neuropsychological Models of Speech and Language • Grant M. Walker 17 The Use of Specific Cognitive Abilities in tbe Workplace • Vivian Chou, Rachel Omansky, Charles Scherbaum, Kenneth Yusko, and Harold Goldstein