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Joined: May 2015
Posts: 4
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Joined: May 2015
Posts: 4 |
I don't get it. How is IQ not malleable? To me, it obviously is. Let's look at the WAIS. One of the subtests measures the size of one's vocabulary. Let's say, you have a child who never used to read. She considered it boring. She was still smart though. Suppose she was good at logical reasoning. Hence, you she got through school and ended up doing well on tests and what not. Suppose she took the WISC as a kid and bombed the vocab section.
Suppose, as an adult she takes on a reading intensive major and starts reading a lot more. If you made her take the WAIS now, she'd score higher on the vocab subtest. Let's say her other scores stay constant. Hasn't her IQ increased? If this isn't convincing just imagine that she also reads up on current affairs a lot more as an adult. So, her information subtest score also increases. Again, hasn't her IQ increased?
Maybe potential is fixed but IQ isn't potential. IQ is something that imperfectly correlates to potential.
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Joined: Feb 2008
Posts: 361
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Joined: Feb 2008
Posts: 361 |
I don't get it. How is IQ not malleable? To me, it obviously is. Let's look at the WAIS. One of the subtests measures the size of one's vocabulary. Let's say, you have a child who never used to read. She considered it boring. She was still smart though. Suppose she was good at logical reasoning. Hence, you she got through school and ended up doing well on tests and what not. Suppose she took the WISC as a kid and bombed the vocab section.
Suppose, as an adult she takes on a reading intensive major and starts reading a lot more. If you made her take the WAIS now, she'd score higher on the vocab subtest. Let's say her other scores stay constant. Hasn't her IQ increased? If this isn't convincing just imagine that she also reads up on current affairs a lot more as an adult. So, her information subtest score also increases. Again, hasn't her IQ increased?
Maybe potential is fixed but IQ isn't potential. IQ is something that imperfectly correlates to potential. FWIW, I think IQ score is a rather imperfect measure of ability. I do think ability, or at least expression of ability (er, is that just performance?), can change, especially to the extent that a child's processing improves (over time or, say, with therapies). However, in the particular example you suggest, it seems to me that the adult version of the person demonstrates better performance rather than increased inherent ability. On the other hand, if ability is simply the potential for performance, perhaps you are correct. Maybe the question for this example is the extent to which vocabulary is truly indicative of ability as opposed to performance as a proxy for ability. I'm getting tongue-tied here...
Last edited by snowgirl; 07/10/15 08:24 AM.
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Joined: Feb 2010
Posts: 2,640
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Joined: Feb 2010
Posts: 2,640 |
I believe crystallized intelligence increases with age and education, while fluid intelligence starts to decrease at 30. In the 20s, actually, but the news is not all bad ... Older Really Can Mean Wiserby BENEDICT CAREY New York Times March 16, 2015 Behind all those canned compliments for older adults spry! wily! wise! is an appreciation for something that scientists have had a hard time characterizing: mental faculties that improve with age.
Knowledge is a large part of the equation, of course. People who are middle-aged and older tend to know more than young adults, by virtue of having been around longer, and score higher on vocabulary tests, crossword puzzles and other measures of so-called crystallized intelligence.
Still, young adults who consult their elders (mostly when desperate) dont do so just to gather facts, solve crosswords or borrow a credit card. Nor, generally, are they looking for help with short-term memory or puzzle solving. Those abilities, called fluid intelligence, peak in the 20s.
No, the older brain offers something more, according to a new paper in the journal Psychological Science. Elements of social judgment and short-term memory, important pieces of the cognitive puzzle, may peak later in life than previously thought.
The postdoctoral fellows Joshua Hartshorne of M.I.T. and Laura Germine of Harvard and Massachusetts General Hospital analyzed a huge trove of scores on cognitive tests taken by people of all ages. The researchers found that the broad split in age-related cognition fluid in the young, crystallized in the old masked several important nuances.
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Joined: Apr 2014
Posts: 4,051 Likes: 1
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Joined: Apr 2014
Posts: 4,051 Likes: 1 |
Fluid intelligence, working memory, and processing speed all peak around age 23, while crystallized intelligence (closely associated with verbal intelligence) peaks in the 20s and holds or increases somewhat across the lifespan, absent other pathology. Our capacity to use crystallized and fluid intelligence effectively increases over the lifespan (this is the Wisdom leg of Sternberg's Triarchic Theory of Intelligence, also known as Successful Intelligence). You may find this series of graphs from the standardization data on the WJIII of interest: http://www.iapsych.com/iapresreport7.pdfETA: I realize that something cannot both peak and increase somewhat afterward, but this was less clunky than a more accurate statement reflecting the end of the steep portion of the GC growth curve.
Last edited by aeh; 07/10/15 09:52 AM.
...pronounced like the long vowel and first letter of the alphabet...
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Joined: Apr 2013
Posts: 5,245 Likes: 1
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Joined: Apr 2013
Posts: 5,245 Likes: 1 |
IOW... it increases at a diminishing rate. 
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Joined: Sep 2007
Posts: 3,297
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Joined: Sep 2007
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Fluid intelligence, working memory, and processing speed all peak around age 23, while crystallized intelligence (closely associated with verbal intelligence) peaks in the 20s and holds or increases somewhat across the lifespan, absent other pathology. Our capacity to use crystallized and fluid intelligence effectively increases over the lifespan (this is the Wisdom leg of Sternberg's Triarchic Theory of Intelligence, also known as Successful Intelligence). Your source didn't really note anything about the IQs of the test subjects, though it did say something about W-scores that were +/- 1SD. Were the subjects in the study representative of the population? If so, this means that most of them had IQs between 70 and 130, with most between 85 and 115. I'm going to speculate that working memory, processing speed, etc., may peak sooner in people with lower IQs and later in people with higher IQs. I have little evidence for this statement, and will look it up later when I'm not working. If someone knows of a study on this exact subject (or a review, ideally), I'd be grateful if you could post a link here. Either way, I don't think one can generalize cognitive results from people in the middle of the distribution to people who are >3 SD from the mean.
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Joined: Apr 2014
Posts: 4,051 Likes: 1
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Joined: Apr 2014
Posts: 4,051 Likes: 1 |
Pointed noted, Val. The data set that I linked is the WJIII standardization pool, which is indeed representative of the US population. Nothing is said about the IQs of the test subjects because that is what was being obtained during standardization. It is as generalizable to +3 SD as any other large-scale population sample is, including those we use to derive IQs. (After all, it literally is the data used to derive IQs.) Which is to say, better than nothing.
The other point to consider about that data is that it is not longitudinal, so it tells us mainly about the distribution of cognitive and academic skills in people of different ages, not directly about how cognition changes over the lifespan.
Thanks, indigo, for improving my verbal expression!
...pronounced like the long vowel and first letter of the alphabet...
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Joined: Apr 2013
Posts: 5,245 Likes: 1
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Joined: Apr 2013
Posts: 5,245 Likes: 1 |
Thanks, indigo, for improving my verbal expression! Apologies (blush).  I finally had use for one of my favorite expressions outside of the context of our local school board announcing it is cutting something... when in fact they are increasing it, just not as much as they used to.
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