Can fluid intelligence be reduced to ‘simple’ short-term storage?

Much is written regarding the associations between human intelligence and cognition. However, it is unusual to find comprehensive studies. Here twenty four measures tapping eight cognitive abilities and skills are considered for assessing a sample of one hundred and eighty five young adults. The simultaneous relationships among fluid, crystallized, and spatial intelligence, along with short-term memory, working memory capacity, executive updating, attention, and processing speed are analyzed using a latent-variable approach. The key findings show that (a) short-term storage, working memory, and updating are hardly distinguishable, and (b) fluid intelligence is near-perfectly correlated with these three cognitive functions. It is concluded that this nuclear intelligence component can be largely identified with basic and general short-term storage processes, namely, encoding, maintenance, and retrieval.     

弗洛伊德论上帝的形成（二）

上帝是西方宗教信仰体系中一个核心的概念,它是宗教信仰者将他们不能理性解释的各种恐怖力量人格化之后所形成的崇拜对象,同时信仰者也通过祈祷、牺牲、读经、参拜等各种宗教仪式来表达他们与上帝的联系。那么,在弗洛伊德的精神分析学说中这个上帝又是怎样形成的呢?弗洛伊德认为所谓上帝就是人类在原始状态中对父亲形象的一种扭曲的记忆和病态反应。他的这个结论来源于他对人类原始社会关系的猜测和对儿童普遍心理情结的分析,其意图是将个人行为的理论与人类古老的历史融合在一起,通过分析上帝的形成史来支持他在心理学方面的发现。在《图腾…     

弗洛伊德宗教观的启蒙价值（三）

无论是将宗教视为一种人类精神的“返童症”还是将上帝视为人类“夸张的父亲”,弗洛伊德都没有为宗教或有神论本身的存在提供科学依据,他的工作是从心理分析方面解释宗教的起源和上帝观念的形成,其结果自然是证明了宗教的非理性特征。既然其起源和本质都是非理性的,当然未来人类也不会以理性的方式去维护宗教,他确信人类文明终究会鄙弃宗教。他的这个结论在本质上仍然属于19世纪就开始形成的“机械唯物主义评判传统”,所以,我们仍然将他视为当代无神论的启蒙主义者。同样,弗洛伊德自己也十分清楚自己的精神分析学说在人类启蒙思想中的意义,…     

Correction for Item Response Theory Latent Trait Measurement Error in Linear Mixed Effects Models

Psychometrika - When latent variables are used as outcomes in regression analysis, a common approach that is used to solve the ignored measurement error issue is to take a multilevel perspective on...     

The development of psychological testing in China

The Chinese have been interested in assessing individual differences for thousands of years. This article traces the development of early psychological measurements in China through to the arrival of modern psychometric techniques in the early 20th century. Following the social disruption caused by the Sino‐Japanese War and the Chinese Civil War, the doctrines of the Communist Revolution and finally the Cultural Revolution forced the total abandonment of the idea of measuring individual differences. Since the end of the Cultural Revolution in the 1970s, however, the need for psychological measurement has been increasingly recognised, particularly because of needs in the fields of clinical and educational practice. As a result, there are now many university courses for training testing professionals. It is also important to have tests that are suitable to use in China. Simply to translate English‐language tests into Chinese may bias their results because of cultural differences, so tests should be revised in order to make their results equivalent, or new tests appropriate to their culture should be devised by Chinese psychologists. Psychological testing is now used in China in education, mental health, and, increasingly, in personnel selection. The expanding market economy means that effective processes for the selection of managers in business and industry are essential in China. As in many other scientific fields, the Chinese are making progress in psychometric testing and it is likely that psychological measurement of individual differences will make an important contribution to China's continued rapid economic progress in the 21st century.     

Visual marking: selective attention to asynchronous temporal groups

In visual search, when a subset of distractors is previewed 1 s before the target and the remaining distractors, search speed is independent of the number of previewed items. This is visual marking. What allows old items to be marked? Four experiments show that marking is disrupted if the onset of the new items is accompanied by synchronous changes to the old items, but it is not disrupted by changes restricted to the background or by asynchronous changes to the old items. Further, behaviorally relevant old items can be prioritized over new items. Visual marking is based on temporal asynchrony between new and old items, which allows segregation of these items into 2 temporal groups. Attention is then selectively applied to 1 group.     

Perceptual grouping in change detection

Detection of an item's changing of its location from one instance to another is typically unaffected by changes in the shape or color of contextual items. However, we demonstrate here that such location change detection is severely impaired if the elongated axes of contextual items change orientation, even though individual locations remain constant and even though the orientation was irrelevant to the task. Changing the orientations of the elongated stimuli altered the perceptual organization of the display, which had an important influence on change detection. In detecting location changes, subjects were unable to ignore changes in orientation unless additional, invariant grouping cues were provided or unless the items changing orientation could be actively ignored using feature-based attention (color cues). Our results suggest that some relational grouping cues are represented in change detection even when they are task irrelevant.     

Effects of phonological length on the attentional blink for words

The authors tested whether the attentional blink (AB), a deficit in the ability to report a second target appearing within half a second of a first target, may reflect limitations for consolidating visual stimuli into working memory and awareness. Previous research has shown that people are severely limited in the rate that they can identify and report visual events presented in rapid succession. Word length was examined, a variable known to affect verbal working memory. Experiment 1 showed that the AB was modulated by the phonological length of the first target. Phonologically longer pseudowords triggered larger blink deficits. Experiment 2 also demonstrated the word-length effect on the AB using real-world stimuli, anagrams, that controlled for low-level visual differences between conditions. These data support proposals that the AB reflects a difficulty in consolidating information into working memory.     

Temporal contextual cuing of visual attention

Previous research has shown how spatial attention is guided to a target location, but little is understood about how attention is allocated to an event in time. The authors introduce a paradigm to manipulate the sequential structure of visual events independent of responses. They asked whether this temporal context could be implicitly learned and used to guide attention to a relative point in time or location, or both, in space. Experiments show that sequentially structured event durations, event identities, and spatiotemporal event sequences can guide attention to a point in time as well as to a target event's identity and location. Cuing was found to rely heavily on the element immediately preceding the target, although cuing from earlier items also was evident. Learning was implicit in all cases. These results show that the sequential structure of the visual world plays an important role in guiding visual attention to target events.     

The Age and Gender Effect on Four Forms of Peer Victimization among Chinese Children and Adolescents

Applied Research in Quality of Life - This study is the first to examine the effects of age and gender on different forms of peer victimization among local Chinese schoolchildren in Hong Kong. The...