Individual and Developmental Differences in Cognitive-Processing Components of Mental Ability

KEATING, DANIEL P., and BOBBITT, BRUCE L. Individual and Developmental Differences in Cognitive-processing Components of Mental Ability. CHILD DEVELOPMENT, 1978, 49, 155-167. Cognitive activity has been viewed from a variety of research perspectives, but there have been few attempts to integrate these different perspectives theoretically or empirically in order to gain a more general picture of human cognition. The 3 perspectives of developmental psychology, experimental psychology, and differential psychology are used in this research in an attempt to understand better the nature of mental ability. Specifically, we searched for differences in basic cognitive processing which could be systematically related to either developmental or individual differences between the subjects. In 3 experiments (simple vs. choice reaction time, Posner letter identification, and Sternberg memory scanning), we looked for interactions of experimental condition with age or ability (defined by Raven's matrices scores). Interactions with age were found in the reaction time and letter identification studies and with ability in letter identification and memory scanning. Additional analyses revealed that a substantial amount of test-score variance was accounted for by the processing variables and that the interrelations of the processing variables provided some evidence for a sequential model of cognitive activity.