Listening to speech in a noisy background is difficult for everyone. While such listening has historically been considered mainly in the context of auditory processing, the role of cognition has attracted considerable interest in recent years. This has been particularly true in the context of life-span research and the comparison of younger and…

Having spent over two decades training teachers, Iveta Kovalcíková writes in this editorial that she has lately been attracted by ideas bridging the growing gap between neurological and psychological research findings and their practical application in practice. Here she argues that outcomes of research on learning processes are insufficiently…

Schools often administer brief intelligence tests as the first step in the identification of students who are cognitively gifted. However, brief measures are often used without consideration of underlying constructs or the psychometric properties of the measures and without regard to the links between screening decisions and educational…

The ranking of Wechsler subtests in terms of their "g" loadings is equivalent to ranking them in terms of the cognitive complexity of the tasks measured. Lower performing groups do not always fall behind higher performing groups the more complex the task. But that is the general rule, no matter whether the cause of the lower performance…

Mental chronometry (MC) studies cognitive processes measured by time. It provides an absolute, ratio scale. The limitations of instrumentation and statistical analysis caused the early studies in MC to be eclipsed by the "paper-and-pencil" psychometric tests started by Binet. However, they use an age-normed, rather than a ratio scale, which…

In this article, I describe studies conducted over 25 years with secondary and post-secondary L2 learners in the United States. The evidence from these studies shows that there are important connections between students' early L1 skills and their L2 aptitude and L2 proficiency and that individual differences in students' L1 skills in elementary…

In 1989, Hallam Hurt, a neonatologist in Philadelphia, started recruiting poor inner-city women for a study of how cocaine use during pregnancy affects the developing fetus. Dr. Hurt enrolled women who had used cocaine while pregnant and balanced them against a control group of equally poor women who had not taken any drugs. Years later, when the…

Scores on cognitive tasks used in intelligence tests correlate positively with each other, that is, they display a positive manifold of correlations. The positive manifold is often explained by positing a dominant latent variable, the g factor, associated with a single quantitative cognitive or biological process or capacity. In this article, a…

Gignac [Gignac, G. E. (2006). "Evaluating subtest "g" saturation levels via the single trait-correlated uniqueness (STCU) SEM approach: Evidence in favor of crystallized subtests as the best indicators of "g"." "Intelligence," 34, 29-46.] used a single-trait correlated uniqueness (STCU) CFA approach to…

This paper reports the results of a two-year longitudinal study of the relationship between self-assessed intelligence (SAI) and academic performance (AP) in a sample of 184 British undergraduate students. Results showed significant correlations between SAI (both before and after taking an IQ test) and academic exam marks obtained two years later,…