ReviewIntelligence and speed of information-processing: A review of 50 years of research
Section snippets
Method
An extensive literature search from 1955 to 2005 was completed with the assistance of electronic search engines PSYCARTICLES and PSYCINFO, as well as relevant scholarly books and journals. Paired combinations of the following search terms were used electronically: “reaction time”, “response time”, “mental speed”, “speed of processing”, “speed of short-term memory processing”, “speed of long-term memory retrieval”, “chronometric ability”, “inspection time”, “task complexity”, “intelligence”,
Results
The overall sample size of studies included in this review was 53,542. Individual study sample sizes ranged from ten to 10,535 participants, with 278.9 participants as the mean sample size (s = 963.12). The inter-quartile ranges were as follows: 25th = 49.25, 50th = 82, and 75th = 177. Of those studies that reported the sexes of their subjects, the average sample had between zero and 3811 female participants with a mean of 103.7 (s = 341.38), and between zero and 3674 male participants, with a mean of
Discussion
The results of this review indicate that diverse measures of mental speed are significantly correlated with measured intelligence. There is a trend – among some mental speed tasks – for more complex measures to be more highly correlated with intelligence but this effect is not evident for all tasks. The results also reveal that mental speed often (though not always) correlates more strongly with gf than with gc. This is particularly evident for novel mental speed tasks – many of which fell into
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