Mind and intelligence: Integrating developmental, psychometric, and cognitive theories of human mind

Abstract

This chapter summarizes a comprehensive theory of intellectual organization and growth. The theory specifies a common core of processes (abstraction, representational alignment, and cognizance, i.e., AACog) underlying inference and meaning making. AACog develops over four reconceptualization cycles (episodic representations, realistic representations, rate-based inference and principle-based inference starting at birth, 2, 6, and 11 years, respectively) with two phases in each (production of new mental units and alignment). This sequence relates to changes in processing efficiency and working memory (WM) in overlapping cycles such that relations with efficiency are high in the production phases and relations with WM are high in the alignment phases over all cycles. Reconceptualization is self-propelled because AACog continuously generates new mental content expressed in representations of increasing inclusiveness and resolution. Each cycle culminates into an insight about the cycle's representations and underlying inferential processes that is expressed into executive programs of increasing flexibility. Learning addressed to this insight accelerates the course of reconceptualization. Individual differences in intellectual growth are related to both the state of this core and its interaction with different cognitively primary domains (e.g. categorical, quantitative, spatial cognition, etc.). We will also demonstrate that different levels of intelligence expressed through IQ measures actually correspond to different types of representational and problem-solving possibilities as expressed through the AACog reconceptualization cycles. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2016 APA, all rights reserved)