Wendy Johnson and Thomas Bouchard are tearing up the “Articles in Press” section of Intelligence. Their latest work expands on their recent paper on sex differences in mental abilities described by Darth Quixote.
The follow-up, “Sex differences in mental ability: A proposed means to link them to brain structure and function”, argues that the pattern of male-female differences in non-g factors could be explained by structural differences in the brain, which they propose to study. They conclude:
there appear to be two basic dimensions of residual ability that underlie g (Johnson & Bouchard, in press). They involve rotation-verbal and focus-diffusion cognitive approaches to problem-solving. Men and women tend to differ on these dimensions. Men are concentrated more toward the rotation pole of the rotation-verbal dimension and women are concentrated more toward the verbal pole. Men are concentrated more toward the focus pole of the focus-diffusion dimension and women are concentrated more toward the diffusion pole. Three different batteries of mental ability tests show very consistent patterns of lack of measurement invariance across sex and each of the two residual ability dimensions. This is consistent with the hypothesis that these dimensions identify differences in cognitive approaches to problem solving that may be reflected in individual and sex differences in brain structure and function. This hypothesis can be readily tested using two novel approaches to scoring the WAIS. In addition, knowledge of participants’ positions along these dimensions may help to explain already observed individual differences in brain structure and function. We propose that investigation of these dimensions will contribute substantively to our understanding of how the biological brain produces abstract intellectual performance.
Related: The open letter to Nature; Debate at the PLoS blog
Comments are closed.