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)
“On and on eternally
Shall your altered fluid run,
Bud and bloom and go to seed;
But your singing days are done;”
—Edna St. Vincent Millay (1892–1950)
“Really to succeed, we must give; of our souls to the soulless, of our love to the lonely, of our intelligence to the dull. Business is quite as much a process of giving as it is of getting.”
—Alice Foote MacDougall (1867–1945)
“When a man goes through six years’ training to be a doctor he will never be the same. He knows too much.”
—Enid Bagnold (1889–1981)
“I am not responsible for the successful working of the machinery of society.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)
“A work which is not here: a covenant
‘Twill be between us; but, whatever fate
Befal thee, I shall love thee to the last,
And bear thy memory with me to the grave.””
—William Wordsworth (1770–1850)