Charting the cognitive sphere: Tactile-kinesthetic performance within the structure of intelligence

Perceptual Underconfidence

Experimental interest in human decision making has been fertile in the past two decades. It is generally recognized that answers to questions involving general knowledge tend to produce overconfidence, whereas responses to perceptual tasks often result in underconfidence. While experimental psychologists debated the relative merits of single or dual explanations of these phenomena, differential psychologists suggested that confidence is a trait: Some people have high confidence and others express the opposite, no matter what type of task is undertaken. The current study examined these different perspectives using two complex cognitive and nine perceptual discrimination tasks from different sensory modalities. Findings suggest that underconfidence does not generalize across the perceptual domain, indicating that a more complex account of the miscalibration effect is needed. Such an account should incorporate both task characteristics and individual differences to produce a satisfactory psychological explanation of miscalibration. This point is highlighted by the presence of a strong confidence factor that has loadings from confidence ratings from diverse perceptual and cognitive tasks employed in this study.

Who benefits from cooperative learning with movement activity?

The goal of this study is to identify learners who are most likely to benefit from a small group cooperative learning strategy, which includes tasks involving movement activities. The study comprised 158 learners from five second and third grade classes learning about angles. The research tools included structured observation of each learner and pre- and post-tests. The analysis identified three behavioural clusters: ‘active’, ‘social’ and ‘passive’. The results suggest that students who are physically active while seeking knowledge and/or solutions are more successful than their peers who are more socially active, even if initially they were lower achievers. Passive students demonstrated the lowest academic achievements. This study points to a possible solution for the problems that cooperative group learning, based mainly on verbal interaction, often encounter at the primary education level.

Correspondence Between the General Ability to Discriminate Sensory Stimuli and General Intelligence

For more than a century the veracity of Spearman’s postulate that there is a nearly perfect correspondence between general intelligence and general sensory discrimination has remained unresolved. Most studies have found significant albeit small correlations. However, this can be used neither to confirm nor dismiss Spearman’s postulate, a major weakness of previous research being that only single discrimination capacities were considered rather than general discrimination. The present study examines Spearman’s hypothesis with a sample of 1,330 5- to 10-year-old children, using structural equation modeling. The results support Spearman’s hypothesis with a strong correlation (r = .78). Results are discussed in terms of the validity of the general sensory discrimination factor. In addition, age-group-specific analyses explored the age differentiation hypothesis.

Evaluating the interdependence of aging-related changes in visual and auditory acuity, balance, and cognitive functioning

High proportions of shared age-related variance are found among measures of perceptual acuity, balance, muscle strength, and cognitive capabilities in age-heterogeneous, cross-sectional studies. Reliance on cross-sectional studies is problematic, however, because associations may arise from age-related mean trends. Narrow age-cohort samples provide an alternative basis for testing hypotheses regarding associations among rates of change. Cross-domain associations were evaluated in combined 75-year-old cohort samples from Denmark, Finland, and Sweden. In general, no consistent associations were found across sensory, balance, strength, and cognitive domains. These findings indicate that the effects of aging on sensory acuity, balance, and cognitive functioning are likely to be largely independent, multidimensional, and complex at the level of the individual.