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:
“My only companions were the mice, which came to pick up the crumbs that had been left in those scraps of paper; still, as everywhere, pensioners on man, and not unwisely improving this elevated tract for their habitation. They nibbled what was for them; I nibbled what was for me.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)
“It is more than likely that the brain itself is, in origin and development, only a sort of great clot of genital fluid held in suspense or reserved.... This hypothesis ... would explain the enormous content of the brain as a maker or presenter of images.”
—Ezra Pound (1885–1972)
“Given for one instant an intelligence which could comprehend all the forces by which nature is animated and the respective positions of the beings which compose it, if moreover this intelligence were vast enough to submit these data to analysis, it would embrace in the same formula both the movements of the largest bodies in the universe and those of the lightest atom; to it nothing would be uncertain, and the future as the past would be present to its eyes.”
—Pierre Simon De Laplace (1749–1827)
“The sum and substance of female education in America, as in England, is training women to consider marriage as the sole object in life, and to pretend that they do not think so.”
—Harriet Martineau (1802–1876)
“We deny your internationalism, because it is a luxury which only the upper classes can afford; the working people are hopelessly bound to their native shores.”
—Benito Mussolini (1883–1945)
“All water has a perfect memory and is forever trying to get back to where it was.”
—Toni Morrison (b. 1931)