Here, intelligence is taken to mean scores from psychometric tests of cognitive functions. This essay describes how cognitive tests offer assessments of brain functioning--an otherwise difficult-to-assess organ--that have proved enduringly useful in the field of health and medicine. The two "consequential world problems" (the phrase used…

Previous research has indicated that education influences cognitive development, but it is unclear what, precisely, is being improved. Here, we tested whether education is associated with cognitive test score improvements via domain-general effects on general cognitive ability ("g"), or via domain-specific effects on particular cognitive…

To test whether cognitive ability predicts survival from age 79 to 89 years data were collected from 543 (230 male) participants who entered the study at a mean age of 79.1 years. Most had taken the Moray House Test of general intelligence (MHT) when aged 11 and 79 years from which, in addition to intelligence measures at these two time points,…

Childhood intelligence (age 11) and occupational social status at midlife (age 46 to 51) was associated with marital status and reproduction in a sample from the Aberdeen Children of the 1950s cohort study (N = 9614). Male and female divorcees had lower childhood intelligence test scores than their married counterparts, but no meaningful…

The long-term effects of secondary-school reforms in the first half of the 20th century are investigated through the long-term follow up of a sample of people born in Scotland in 1936 who were first surveyed in 1947. Members of the sample who were living in the Lothian region of Scotland were re-interviewed in 2004-2007, providing information…

Here we reprint, and provide background and a commentary on, a recently-rediscovered lecture by Godfrey H. Thomson entitled, "Intelligence and civilisation." It was delivered at the University of Manchester, UK, on 23rd October, 1936, printed in 1937 in the short-lived "Journal of the University of Manchester" and as a pamphlet…

The Scottish Mental Survey of 1932 (SMS1932) provides a record of intelligence test scores for almost a complete year-of-birth group of children born in 1921. By linking UK Army personnel records, the Scottish National War Memorial data, and the SMS1932 dataset it was possible to examine the effect of childhood intelligence scores on wartime…

To explore the possible neural foundations of individual differences in intelligence test scores, we examined the associations between Raven's Matrices scores and two tasks that were administered in a functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) setting. The two tasks were an n-back working memory (N = 37) task and inspection time (N = 47). The…

Modern factor analysis is the outgrowth of Spearman's original "2-factor" model of intelligence, according to which a mental test score is regarded as the sum of a general factor and a specific factor. As early as 1914, Godfrey Thomson realized that the data did not require this interpretation and he demonstrated this by proposing what became…

Professor Sir Godfrey Thomson is one of the key foundational actors in the history of the educational sciences in the UK. At a time when educational studies and the study of educational psychology were very closely linked, in the decades of the mid-twentieth century, Thomson was a crucial figure in education research. He is known for his work on…

We studied the age-related differences in inspection time and multiple cognitive domains in a group of monozygotic (MZ) and dizygotic (DZ) twins aged 7 to 17 years. Data from 111 twin pairs and 19 singleton siblings were included. We found clear age-related trends towards more efficient visual information processing in older participants. There…

Little is known about the association between measured intelligence and how people participate in democratic processes. In the 1970 British Cohort Study, we examined the association between childhood intelligence and, at age 34: whether and how people voted in the 2001 UK general election; how they intended to vote; and whether they had taken part…

A critical review of the theoretical basis and empirical results of the frequency accrual speed test (FAST) developed by D. Vickers and others (1993) leads to the conclusion that the FAST is not appropriately described as an alternative to the inspection time (IT) task, and that results from FAST are not generalizable to IT. (SLD)

D. K. Detterman and M. H. Daniel's recognition (1989) that intertest correlations for intelligence quotient (IQ) might not be uniform across the range of ability (and age) was anticipated by C. E. Spearman (1904). Detterman and Daniel appear to have rediscovered Spearman's suggested law of diminishing returns. (SLD)

Explored the relationship of both simple and four-choice reaction time to scores for the Alice Heim 4 (AH4) test to assess whether correlations previously reported adequately represented the strength of the relationship and to test for departures from linearity. Findings for 900 adolescents and adult show the correlation to be a good summary for…