Improving Fluid Intelligence With Training On Working Memory
According to David Geary, Gf and Gc can be traced to two separate brain systems. Fluid intelligence involves the dorsolateral prefrontal cortex, the anterior cingulate cortex, and other systems related to attention and short-term memory. Crystallized intelligence appears to be a function of brain regions that involve the storage and usage of long-term memories, such as the hippocampus.
In a controversial study, Susanne M. Jaeggi and her colleagues at the University of Michigan, found that healthy young adults who practiced a demanding working memory task (dual n-back) approximately 25 minutes per day for between 8 and 19 days, had statistically significant increases in their scores on a matrix test of fluid intelligence taken before and after the training than a control group who did not do any training at all.
A second study conducted at the University of Technology in Hangzhou, China, supports Jaeggi's results independently. After student subjects were given a 10 day training regime based on the dual n-back working memory theory, the students were tested on Raven's Standard Progressive Matrices. Their scores were found to have increased significantly.
Subsequent studies, namely by Chooi & Thompson, Redick et al do not support Jaeggi claims. Although participants' performance on the training task improved, results from latter did not suggest any significant improvement in the mental abilities tested, especially fluid intelligence and working memory capacity. The meta-analytic review concluded that "memory training programs appear to produce short-term, specific training effects that do not generalize."
Read more about this topic: Fluid And Crystallized Intelligence
Famous quotes containing the words improving, fluid, intelligence, training, working and/or memory:
“I know of no pursuit in which more real and important services can be rendered to any country than by improving its agriculture, its breed of useful animals, and other branches of a husbandman’s cares.”
—George Washington (1732–1799)
“Eye, gazelle, delicate wanderer,
Drinker of horizon’s fluid line;
Ear that suspends on a chord
The spirit drinking timelessness;
Touch, love, all senses;”
—Stephen Spender (1909–1995)
“Nota: man is the intelligence of his soil,
The sovereign ghost. As such, the Socrates
Of snails, musician of pears, principium
And lex. Sed quæritur: is this same wig
Of things, this nincompated pedagogue,
Preceptor to the sea?”
—Wallace Stevens (1879–1955)
“It’s [motherhood] the biggest on-the-job- training program in existence today.”
—Erma Bombeck (20th century)
“... probably all of the women in this book are working to make part of the same quilt to keep us from freezing to death in a world that grows harsher and bleaker—where male is the norm and the ideal human being is hard, violent and cold: a macho rock. Every woman who makes of her living something strong and good is sharing bread with us.”
—Marge Piercy (b. 1936)
“The memory ... experiencing and re-experiencing, has such power over one’s mere personal life, that one has merely lived.”
—Rebecca West (1892–1983)