A g Theorist on Why Kovacs and Conway's Process Overlap Theory Amplifies, Not Opposes, g Theory

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Acknowledgments

This article is dedicated to the memory of Earl B. Hunt (1933–2016): Friend, colleague, constructive critic, and leader in joining psychology's experimental and differential approaches to intelligence.

Notes

¹ Presumably oblique models like Thurstone's Primary Abilities and Cattell's Gf-Gc theory.

² Eysenck's (1939) first publication reconciled Spearman and Thurstone's dueling factor analytic models: Spearman posting only a general factor (g) and test specificity, and Thurstone positing a set of distinct primary abilities but no general factor.

³ Jensen always cautioned that precision in measurement and conceptualization was essential for theoretical purposes. Degree of error must be taken into account to avoid misinterpreting research results, for example, by not realizing that mean differences or correlations have been artificially lowered by common statistical artifacts.

⁴ Jensen began his career as what we would now call a cognitive psychologist, for instance, conducting experiments with the Stroop test to understand general principles in learning.

⁵ Icannot be sure because Kovacs and Conway (this issue) refer to complexity sometimes as an attribute of cognitive processes (“This implies that g is related to the complexity of cognitive activity,” p. 155), sometimes as an attribute of experimental tasks that evoke them (“how complex a test is,” p. 155), and at other times as the extent to which one particular class of processes is used in solving problems (“the overlap is caused by executive functions,” p. 171).