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:
“While the rest of the world has been improving technology, Ghana has been improving the quality of man’s humanity to man.”
—Maya Angelou (b. 1928)
“It is a mischievous notion that we are come late into nature; that the world was finished a long time ago. As the world was plastic and fluid in the hands of God, so it is ever to so much of his attributes as we bring to it. To ignorance and sin, it is flint. They adapt to themselves to it as they may; but in proportion as a man has anything in him divine, the firmament flows before him and takes his signet and form.”
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)
“You have to begin to lose your memory, if only in bits and pieces, to realize that memory is what makes our lives. Life without memory is no life at all, just as an intelligence without the possibility of expression is not really an intelligence. Our memory is our coherence, our reason, our feeling, even our action. Without it, we are nothing.”
—Luis Buñuel (1900–1983)
“Dancing is a wonderful training for girls, it’s the first way you learn to guess what a man is going to do before he does it.”
—Christopher Morley (1890–1957)
“I was the one who was working to destroy the one thing to which I was committed, that is, my relationship with Gilberte; I was doing so by creating, little by little and through the prolonged separation from my friend, not her indifference, but my own. It was toward a long and cruel suicide of the self within myself which loved Gilberte that I continuously set myself ...”
—Marcel Proust (1871–1922)
“Why is it that we have enough memory to recollect the most minute circumstances of something that has happened to us, but not enough to remember how many times we have recounted them to the same person?”
—François, Duc De La Rochefoucauld (1613–1680)