Inspection time and g

Abstract

This chapter reviews the evidence for a moderately strong correlation between "inspection time" (IT) and scores on psychometric ability tests. The chapter also explores its context in terms of developing an improved understanding of human intelligence. Arthur Jensen's contribution to this work has been considerable as he has helped to establish the size of this correlation at around -0.5; and applied IT together with other chronometric measures based on reaction times (RTs) to the task of shifting the description of intelligence from the psychometric to a psychological level. The realization of the potential of this exploratory approach must await an established account of what IT measures. IT appears to measure individual differences in a capacity to detect change in a very briefly presented stimulus array, and this may be psychologically distinct from whatever RTs measure. However, this capacity captured by IT is also probably influenced by more than one psychological function. Moreover, the extent to which each of these functions is involved may depend on whether participants are children, or young, or elderly adults, or persons with an intellectual disability. Nonetheless, research has demonstrated that unitary psychometric general cognitive ability is almost certainly a consequence of the contribution of several psychological functions. © 2003 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.