g and Its Underlying Executive Processes

Dear Colleagues,

according to Kovacs and Conway's (2016) process overlap theory (POT), the g factor of psychometric intelligence is the result of overlapping domain-general executive processes. Such overlapping processes would result in a pattern of positive correlations between different tests of intelligence in the sense of the positive manifold. More specifically, some executive processes underlie the correlation between intelligence tests a and b, but other executive processes lead to a correlation between intelligence tests a and c. Thus, POT considers the general factor of psychometric intelligence (g) to be a composition of several (more or less) distinct executive processes instead of a unitary entity.

If different executive processes really explained the unique portions of g variance, this result would support POT. In this case, it would be important to identify these processes and to outline the interplay between these executive processes and, thus, the internal structure of g. Otherwise, if different executive processes explain common, non-unique variance in g, this result would contradict the assumption of POT but not the assumption of a unitary g.

This Special Issue of the Journal of Intelligence will contribute to answering this assumption of POT and will compile investigations considering at least two executive processes and examining their unique and common variance shared with g. The executive processes should be operationalized as unambiguously as possible so that it would be possible to identify the executive processes important for our understanding of g. Two executive processes might be enough to determine the unique and common variance of these processes and g. A more convincing approach, however, would be to examine whether a latent variable can be derived from three or more executive processes and whether single executive processes uniquely explain the variance of g beyond the variance explained by the more general latent variable.

Already Carroll (1991) pointed to the impurity of g suggesting that either an unbalanced selection of tests or method effects might contribute to variance in g, which is actually unrelated to its core. If an executive process, however, is related (uniquely) to such a method effect, this might be erroneously interpreted as support of POT. Thus, papers that investigate possible biases in g and their relation to executive processes are also invited. Furthermore, we may also consider contributions with relevance to POT more in general or to the nature of g more in general. If you have any doubts about whether a planned contribution would fit within the scope as defined above, please contact [email protected].

Authors are invited to contribute manuscripts with new and not yet published data as well as with re-analyzed data, which might have been published previously to answer another research question.

Prof. Dr. Stefan J. Troche
Guest Editor

References

Carroll, J. B. (1991). No demonstration that g is not unitary, but there’s more to the story: comment on Kranzler and Jensen. Intelligence, 15, 423–436.

Kovacs, K. & Conway, A. R. A. (2016). Process Overlap Theory: A unified account of the general factor of intelligence. Psychological Inquiry, 27, 151–177.

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