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)
“There are no fixtures in nature. The universe is fluid and volatile. Permanence is but a word of degrees. Our globe seen by God is a transparent law, not a mass of facts. The law dissolves the fact and holds it fluid.”
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)
“Give me a sentence which no intelligence can understand. There must be a kind of life and palpitation to it, and under its words a kind of blood must circulate forever.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)
“I’m not suggesting that all men are beautiful, vulnerable boys, but we all started out that way. What happened to us? How did we become monsters of feminist nightmares? The answer, of course, is that we underwent a careful and deliberate process of gender training, sometimes brutal, always dehumanizing, cutting away large chunks of ourselves. Little girls went through something similarly crippling. If the gender training was successful, we each ended up being half a person.”
—Frank Pittman (20th century)
“I meet him at every turn. He is more alive than ever he was. He has earned immortality. He is not confined to North Elba nor to Kansas. He is no longer working in secret. He works in public, and in the clearest light that shines on this land.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)
“Twenty or thirty years ago, in the army, we had a lot of obscure adventures, and years later we tell them at parties, and suddenly we realize that those two very difficult years of our lives have become lumped together into a few episodes that have lodged in our memory in a standardized form, and are always told in a standardized way, in the same words. But in fact that lump of memories has nothing whatsoever to do with our experience of those two years in the army and what it has made of us.”
—Václav Havel (b. 1936)