Demand characteristics of music affect performance on the Wonderlic Personnel Test Of Intelligence

This study examined whether demand characteristics concerning music can change subjects' performance on the Wonderlic Personnel Test of intelligence. Participants (N= 60) were randomly assigned and informed either that Mozart's music typically enhances cognitive performance or diminishes it. They then completed the Wonderlic Personnel Test while listening to a Mozart piano sonata. The subjects with a positive set answered significantly more items correctly on the test (14%) than those with a negative set (p = .03). This result may hold implications for the study of the 'Mozart effect'.     

What one intelligence test measures: a theoretical account of the processing in the Raven Progressive Matrices Test

The cognitive processes in a widely used, nonverbal test of analytic intelligence, the Raven Progressive Matrices Test (Raven, 1962), are analyzed in terms of which processes distinguish between higher scoring and lower scoring subjects and which processes are common to all subjects and all items on the test. The analysis is based on detailed performance characteristics, such as verbal protocols, eye-fixation patterns, and errors. The theory is expressed as a pair of computer simulation models that perform like the median or best college students in the sample. The processing characteristic common to all subjects is an incremental, reiterative strategy for encoding and inducing the regularities in each problem. The processes that distinguish among individuals are primarily the ability to induce abstract relations and the ability to dynamically manage a large set of problem-solving goals in working memory.     

Verbal comprehension: The lexical decomposition strategy to define unfamiliar words

Two experiments were conducted to study one facet of verbal intelligence—the ability of adolescents and adults to use a lexical decomposition strategy to define prefixed words and pseudowords. In the first experiment, subjects in grades 8, 10, 11, and college were given a multiple-choice vocabulary test. The test measured subjects' abilities to use wordpart meanings when defining words. Subjects' metacognitive knowledge of both the words and their prefixes and stems was assessed through a pair of rating tasks. Adults performed better than the adolescents on the vocabulary test. Evidence for a lexical decomposition strategy was found for both the adolescents and adults on subsets of the most familiar items. Measures of metacognitive knowledge were related significantly to measures of vocabulary performance for the adolescents and adults.In the second experiment, college subjects were given one of four multiple-choice vocabulary tests that included decomposable (prefixed) and nondecomposable known (words) and unknown (pseudowords) stimuli. Evidence for use of the lexical decomposition strategy was strong even though there were small effects of two performance factors predicted to affect the use of the strategy. Results are discussed in relation to a theory on the use of internal context in verbal comprehension     

Reserve capacity of the elderly in aging-sensitive tests of fluid intelligence: replication and extension

Fluid intelligence belongs to that cluster of intellectual abilities evincing aging loss. To examine further the range of intellectual reserve available to aging individuals and the question of replicability in a new cultural and laboratory setting, 204 healthy older adults (mean age = 72 years; range = 60-86) participated in a short-term longitudinal training study. For experimental subjects, 10 sessions consisted of cognitive training involving two subability tests (Figural Relations, Induction) of fluid intelligence. The pattern of outcomes replicates and expands on earlier studies. Older adults have the reserve to evince substantial increases in levels of performance in fluid intelligence tests. Transfer of training, however, is narrow in scope. Training also increases accuracy of performance and the ability to solve more difficult test items. Difficulty level was estimated in a separate study, with a comparable sample of N = 112 elderly adults. Future research is suggested to examine whether intellectual reserve extends to near-maximum levels of performance.     

Claimed self-handicaps and the self-handicapper: The relation of reduction in intended effort to performance

Two studies were conducted to examine the hypothesis that individuals who claim lack of effort as a handicap in anticipation of an unsuccessful performance will perform poorly to be consistent with the claim. Subjects who scored high or low on the Self-Handicapping Scale (Jones & Rhodewalt, 1982) were led to believe that they were about to take a test that was either important or trivial (high or low ego-relevance) and that they would either perform well or poorly (high or low expected difficulty). They then indicated in private how hard they intended to try and subsequently took the test. In both studies, high self-handicapping subjects who anticipated a difficult test indicated that they would withhold effort on the test and displayed poorer performance than subjects in all other conditions. These findings were obtained regardless of the level of importance of the test. Study 2 demonstrated additionally that the effects of self-handicapping were independent of the subject's level of self-esteem. Study 2 also found that high self-handicapping subjects who expected a difficult test reported experiencing more distracting cognitions while taking the test than did other subjects. The results are discussed with regard to the effects of anticipatory self-protective behavior on performance outcomes.     

Augmented Feedback Presented in a Virtual Environment Accelerates Learning of a Difficult Motor Task

One can use a number of techniques (e.g., from videotaping to computer enhancement of the environment) to augment the feedback that a subject usually receives during training on a motor task. Although some forms of augmented feedback have been shown to enhance performance on isolated isometric tasks during training, when the feedback has been removed subjects have sometimes not been able to perform as well in the "real-world" task as controls. Indeed, for realistic, nonisometric motor tasks, improved skill acquisition because of augmented feedback has not been demonstrated. In the present experiments, subjects (Experiment 1, N = 42; Experiment 2, N = 21) performed with a system that was designed for teaching a difficult multijoint movement in a table tennis environment. The system was a fairly realistic computer animation of the environment and included paddles for the teacher and subject, as well as a virtual ball. Each subject attempted to learn a difficult shot by matching the pattern of movements of the expert teacher. Augmented feedback focused the attention of the subject on a minimum set of movement details that were most relevant to the task; feedback was presented in a form that required the least perceptual processing. Effectiveness of training was determined by measuring their performance in the real task. Subjects who received the virtual environment training performed significantly better than subjects who received a comparable amount of real-task practice or coaching. Kinematic analysis indicated that practice with the expert's trajectory served as a basis for performance on the real-world task and that the movements executed after training were subject-specific modifications of the expert's trajectory. Practice with this trajectory alone was not sufficient for transfer to the real task, however: When a critical component of the virtual environment was removed, subjects showed no transfer to the real task.     

The Relative Importance of Anticipated Test Format and Anticipated Test Difficulty on Performance

In this investigation, the relative importance of the effects of anticipated test format and anticipated test difficulty on performance was examined by simultaneously manipulating both. Experiments 1 and 2 showed that test performance was affected more by anticipated test format than by anticipated test difficulty. This suggests that the superior performance of subjects who had anticipated a recall test versus those who had anticipated a recognition test, reported here and in previous studies, is more likely to be due to anticipating a recall format than to anticipating a more difficult test. Experiment 2 showed that subjects who had anticipated a recall test studied longer than subjects who had anticipated a recognition test, even when recall tests were less difficult than recognition tests. One explanation for this finding is that subjects inaccurately monitor the relative difficulty of tests across test formats. Subjects rated recall items as more difficult than recognition items, even when recall items are actually less difficult (Experiment 3). These findings suggest that a priori metacognitive knowledge may reduce the accuracy of on-line metacognitive monitoring.     

Can Item Format (Multiple Choice vs. Open-Ended) Account for Gender Differences in Mathematics Achievement?

The purpose of this study was to investigate differential performance of boys and girls on open-ended (OE) and multiple-choice (MC) items on the 1988 and 1991 International Assessment of Educational Progress (IAEP) mathematics test. In the 1988 mathematics assessment, a representative sample of approximately 1,000 13-year-olds in each of the six participating countries was assessed. In the 1991 mathematics assessment, a representative sample of 9- and 13-year-olds (approximately 1,650 from each age group) in some 20 participating countries was assessed. Analyses of both assessments yielded results that indicated that boys generally performed better than girls in mathematics. In the 1988 assessment, gender effects were larger on MC items than on OE items, corresponding to results of earlier studies. However, the 1991 IAEP assessment produced contrary results: gender effects tended to be larger for OE items than for MC items. These inconsistent results challenge the assertion that girls perform relatively better on OE test items, and suggest that item format alone cannot account for gender differences in mathematics performance. Further investigation of the data revealed that the inconsistent patterns of gender effects with regard to item format were related to the difficulty level of the items, regardless of item format. Correlations between item difficulty and item gender effect size were computed for age 13 in the 1988 assessment and for ages 9 and 13 in the 1991 assessment. The correlations obtained were 0.26, 0.47, and 0.53, respectively, suggesting that the more difficult the items, the better boys perform relative to girls.     

Relative influence of prestige as a determiner of intelligence judgments for occupations

A forced-choice test was constructed to determine how well students could discriminate between occupations on the basis of the average intelligence of the members of the various occupational groups. At the outset, it was known that the prestige of the various occupations would have to be taken into account, and so the 72 forced-choice test items were systematically constructed to represent 24 combinations of intelligence and prestige differences. Accuracy at identifying the occupation with the higher average intelligence was significantly worse than chance, because subjects relied exclusively on prestige to make their choices. On items where the intelligence difference opposed the prestige difference, subjects could have improved their accuracy by flipping coins. The factors leading to significantly worse than chance accuracy, and the potency of prestige, are discussed.     

Social comparison after success and failure: Biased search for information consistent with a self-serving conclusion

Based on the traditional and attributional perspectives on social comparison, it was hypothesized that the search for social comparison information after performance outcomes is biased so as to provide evidence consistent with a favorable self-evaluation. In Experiment 1, subjects were led to believe that they obtained 16 or 8 out of 20 items correct on a bogus social sensitivity test and were then led to expect that most other students performed either well or poorly on the test. They were then given the opportunity to inspect up to 50 scored answer sheets from previous subjects. Consistent with the hypothesis, failure subjects requested more information when they expected it to reveal that most students performed poorly than when they expected it to reveal that most students performed well; success subjects showed little interest in this additional information, regardless of their expectancies as to what it would reveal. Experiment 2 employed a different approach to manipulating performance outcomes and led subjects to expect that most other subjects performed better, the same, or worse than themselves. Regardless of their own performance, subjects showed the least interest in additional information in the higher score expectancy condition and the most interest in additional information in the lower score expectancy condition. The role that this information search bias may play in producing self-serving attributions for success and failure and maintaining positive self-evaluations was discussed.     

Individual differences in tonic activity and reactivity of somatic functioning

Extraversion was negatively correlated with resting HR. On execution of a visual choice RT task, both as a free-response-speed and experimenter-paced (high-signal-frequency) task, the differences observed between introverts and extraverts in tonic HR disappeared. Neurotics displayed resting frontalis EMG values which were not different from those observed for stables; differences did emerge, however, during choice RT tasks (under both conditions), neurotics displaying significantly higher tensional values compared to stables. Females characterized by high HRs at rest were likely to score low on the Social Desirability scale, the direction being opposite to that observed in males.     

Quantitative information presentation and gender: an interaction effect.

The authors investigated whether performance on mathematical test items would be influenced by an interaction between presentation format and gender. One hundred fourteen students in a management accounting course were randomly assigned either to a tabular format or to a graphics format. There were significant main effects for gender and presentation format; men outperformed women, and the subjects who received the tabular format outperformed the subjects who received the graphics format. A significant interaction supported the existence of a conditional relationship between performance on mathematical test items and presentation format. This relationship varied as a function of gender (symmetry permits the interchange of presentation format and gender). Simple effects for the interaction determined that the women who received the graphics presentation did not perform as well as their male counterparts, or as well as other women and men who received the tabular format. The results of this study indicate that presentation format is an important consideration in gender differences for mathematics performance.     

Leftists’ and rightists’ IQ as a function of stereotype salience

This study examined the intellectual performance of leftists (or liberals) and rightists (or conservatives) when a stereotype about members of a disadvantaged outgroup (immigrants) is salient. Building on system-justification theory (SJT) and the motivated social cognition approach of political conservatism, it was predicted that when the stereotype about immigrant students’ underachievement is salient in academic settings, leftist students would perform worse, whereas rightist students would perform better than in a control condition. In two samples, Swiss native students were first reminded (or not) of the stereotype and then performed a difficult intellectual test. The results yielded support for the predictions. These findings illustrate how different ideological motives (system-challenging vs. system-justifying) might influence performance among leftist and rightist students.     

The relationship between quality of attachment in infancy and IQ in kindergarten

In this study, we hypothesized that securely attached infants would in kindergarten perform better on an intelligence test than anxiously attached children. No difference was expected between children of working mothers (working more than 15 hours outside the home) and children of full-time homemakers. Mother-child pairs (N = 77; average age of child was 24 months) were observed during the Strange Situation procedure; three years later, 65 children completed the Leiden Diagnostic Test for measuring intelligence level. Results showed that the securely attached reference group attained the highest IQ. The working status of the mother did not appear to make a difference.     

Effects of Contrived information of Female and Male Performance on the Achievement Behavior of Preschool Girls and Boys1

Twenty-four girls and 24 boys enrolled in a university preschool were given two trials each to perform a marble-dropping task. After the first trial, subjects in the sex-appropriate condition were told that children of their sex perform the task better than children of the opposite sex. Subjects in the sex-inappropriate condition were told that children of their sex perform the task less well than children of the opposite sex. It was hypothesized that sex-appropriate subjects would set higher goals for Trial 2 than control subjects receiving no information and that sex-inappropriate subjects would set lower goals than control subjects. The hypotheses were not supported. Instead, children of both sexes set significantly higher goals when told that boys do better at the task. Interpretations of the results are offered.     

Memory for to-be-performed tasks versus memory for performed tasks

Memory for subject-performed tasks—that is, for simple actions such as lifting a pen, which subjects perform overtly—is better than memory for verbal tasks—that is, when subjects only listen to the action phrases. Here I investigated whether this effect depends on actual performance or whether it also shows up when there is only an intention to perform the task. Koriat, Ben-Zur, and Nussbaum (1990) found that the intention to perform items at test enhanced free recall more than did verbal tasks. Brooks and Gardiner (1994), however, were not able to replicate this finding. In four experiments, I attempted to reconcile this discrepancy by comparing subject-performed tasks, to-beperformed tasks, and verbal tasks under different conditions. The outcome depended on whether a within-subjects design or a between-subjects design was used. In the between-subjects design, memory for subject-performed tasks was better than memory for to-be-performed tasks, and both of these led to better recall performance than did verbal tasks. In a within-subjects design, in contrast, memory for to-be-performed tasks was no different from memory for verbal tasks. These results were independent of whether the test mode was congruent or incongruent. Thus, the discrepant findings of Koriat et al. and of Brooks and Gardiner seem to be due to the design used, pointing to encoding processes as the critical variable. The present results are interpreted to show that actual performance of actions at study provides more information than does only the intention to perform actions at test.     

Psychophysiological reactions to understimulation and overstimulation

Catecholamine output, heart rate, and performance efficiency were examined in 28 Ss during two contrasting stimulus conditions, one of understimulation, and one of overstimulation. During understimulation the subject spent 3 hr performing a vigilance task, and during overstimulation he was exposed for the same time period to a complex sensorimotor test. Both understimulation and overstimulation produced a significant increase of adrenaline and noradrenaline release as compared with a control condition involving a medium amount of stimulation. Subjects who excreted relatively more adrenaline performed significantly better during understimulation, whereas subjects with relatively lower excretion rates of adrenaline tended to perform better under overstimulation. When performance efficiency was related to heart rate it was shown that high-heart rate subjects performed better during understimulation, while low-heart rate subjects performed better during overstimulation.     

When will the milk spoil? Everyday induction in human intelligence

We sought to understand (a) the mental processes underlying everyday predictive and postdictive judgements involving objects undergoing either change or no change of state over time and (b) the relation of these processes to intelligence. Forty adult (nonstudent) participants were asked to solve 40 induction problems, each presented in four forms, for a total of 160 test items. Half of the items involved predictions and half involved postdictions; within each of these two categories, half of the items involved a state change from present to future (prediction) or past (postdiction), and half did not. In addition, each participant completed convergent-discriminant psychometric ability tests measuring inductive reasoning, deductive reasoning, and vocabulary.Prediction was performed more rapidly than postdiction, but was also more susceptible to errors of judgement. Judgements involving change of state were more rapid and less error-prone than were judgements involving no change. A single information-processing model was useful for describing performance on both prediction and postdiction problems. A quantification of stimulus variables affecting performance via this model (with six predictor variables) provided a good account of participants' response latencies. Response latencies showed convergent and discriminant validity, exhibiting rather high correlations with inductive reasoning, but not with deductive reasoning. The paradigm we used thus seems to provide one useful approach to understanding the relationship of everyday induction to human intelligence, and to provide a complement to the more abstract kinds of problems—such as analogies, classifications, series completion, and matrix problems—typically used to test inductive-reasoning abilities, as an aspect of intelligence.     

An Examination of Stereotype Threat in a Motivational Context

This study was conducted to explore 2 potential boundary conditions of the stereotype threat effect. First, we sought to determine if threat would occur for a test administered in a motivational context where consequences were linked to test performance. Second, we examine if the threat elicited by 1 test would generalize to a different measure administered in the same testing session. Using a 2 (control vs. threat) × 2 (order of administration of a personality and intelligence test) × 2 (Black vs. White) between-subjects design, we found that threat can influence test scores, but the relationship between threat and test scores is dependent on both domain identity and racial identity. Interestingly, we found that changes in racial identity (assessed before and after the test) had a significant and positive relationship with cognitive ability test performance for Black test-takers, but not for Whites. It seems that Black individuals who dis-identified themselves from their race (during the course of the testing) were able to perform better on the cognitive ability test. Finally, we find that those in the threat condition performed significantly better on the personality test than those in the control condition, suggesting that threat can generalize and influence performance on tests for which no stereotype exists. Implications of these results for research and practice are discussed.