This book celebrates two triumphs in modern psychology: the successful development and application of a solid measure of general intelligence; and the personal courage and skills of the man who made this possible - Arthur R. Jensen from Berkeley University. The volume traces the history of intelligence from the early 19th century approaches, to the most recent analyses of the hierarchical structure of cognitive abilities, and documents the transition from a hopelessly confused concept of intelligence to the development of an objective measure of psychometric g. The contributions illustrate the impressive power g has with respect to predicting educational achievement, getting an attractive job, or social stratification. The book is divided into six parts as follows: Part I presents the most recent higher-stream analysis of cognitive abilities, Part II deals with biological aspects of g, such as research on brain imaging, glucose uptake, working memory, reaction time, inspection time, and other biological correlates, and concludes with the latest findings in g-related molecular genetics. Part III addresses demographic aspects of g, such as geographic-, race-, and sex-differences, and introduces differential psychological aspects as well. Part IV concentrates on the g nexus, and relates such highly diverse topics as sociology, genius, retardation, training, education, jobs, and crime to g. Part V contains chapters critical of research on g and its genetic relationship, and also presents a rejoinder. Part VI looks at one of the greatest contemporary psychologists, Professor Emeritus Arthur R. Jensen as teacher and mentor.
This book is for those of the general public who want to learn more about mental testing and its controversies. It presupposes no background in the specialized terminologies or mathematical underpinnings of psychometrics, statistics, or quantitative genetics that make most of the serious literature on the "IQ controversy" so inaccessible to the educated public who are not professionals in the field of mental measurement.
Jensen is a controversial figure, largely for his conclusions based on his and other research regarding the causes of race based differences in intelligence and in this book he develops more fully the argument he formulated in his controversial Harvard Education Review article 'How Much Can We Boost IQ and Scholastic Achievement?'. In a wide-ranging survey of the evidence he argues that measured IQ reveals a strong hereditary component and he argues that the system of education which assumes an almost wholly environmentalist view of the causes of group differences capitalizes on a relatively narrow category of human abilities. Since its original publication the controversy surrounding Jensen's ideas has continued as successive generations of psychologists, scientists and policy-makers have grappled with the same issues.
The present burgeoning interest in understanding individual differences in mental abilities in terms of the natural sciences, biology and the brain sciences in particular, demands direct measures that functionally link brain and behavior. One such natural ratio scale is time itself - the time it takes the brain to perform some elementary cognitive task, measured in milliseconds. After more than 25 years researching MC, Jensen here presents results on an absolute scale showing times for intake of visual and auditory information, for accessing short-term and long-term memory, and other cognitive skills, as a function of age, at yearly intervals from 3 to 80 years.-
Jensen is a controversial figure, largely for his conclusions based on his and other research regarding the causes of race based differences in intelligence and in this book he develops more fully the argument he formulated in his controversial Harvard Education Review article 'How Much Can We Boost IQ and Scholastic Achievement?'. In a wide-ranging survey of the evidence he argues that measured IQ reveals a strong hereditary component and he argues that the system of education which assumes an almost wholly environmentalist view of the causes of group differences capitalizes on a relatively narrow category of human abilities. Since its original publication the controversy surrounding Jensen's ideas has continued as successive generations of psychologists, scientists and policy-makers have grappled with the same issues.
Among particular issues discussed in this book are the problems of the cultural disadvantaged, the problems of devising psychological tests which are not biased towards any particular culture, the problems of minority groups of children in education and the relationship between heritability and teachability.
Mental Chronometry (MC) comprises a variety of techniques for measuring the speed with which the brain processes information.First developed in mid-1800, MC was subsequently eclipsed by more complex and practically useful types of psychometric tests stemming from Alfred Binet. This class of mental tests, however, has no true metric relating the test scores to any specific properties of the brain per se. The scores merely represent an ordinal scale, only ranking individuals according to their overall performance on a variety of complex mental tasks. The resulting scores represent no more than ranks rather than being a true metrical scale of any specific dimension of brain function. Such an ordinal scale, which merely ranks individuals in some defined population, possesses no true scale properties, possessing neither a true zero or equal intervals throughout the scale. This deficiency obstructs the development of a true natural science of mental ability. The present burgeoning interest in understanding individual differences in mental abilities in terms of the natural sciences, biology and the brain sciences in particular, demands direct measures that functionally link brain and behavior. One such natural ratio scale is time itself - the time it takes the brain to perform some elementary cognitive task, measured in milliseconds. After more than 25 years researching MC, Jensen here presents results on an absolute scale showing times for intake of visual and auditory information, for accessing short-term and long-term memory, and other cognitive skills, as a function of age, at yearly intervals from 3 to 80 years. The possible uses of MC in neurological diagnosis and the monitoring of drug effects on cognition, the chronometric study of special time-sensitive talents such as musical performance, and presents a theory of general intelligence, or g, as a function of the rate of oscillation of neural action potentials as measured by chronometric methods. Finally, Jensen urges the world-wide standardization of chronometric methods as necessary for advancing MC as a crucial branch of biopsychological science. Provides a different scale to report Mental Chronometry (MC) findings Argues for the global adoption of an absolute scale as opposed to the traditional ordinal scale An important contribution to MC researchers and psychologists and neuroscientists
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