I'm curious, your conclusion appears to be that the Flynn effect is in essence not "real" (i.e., not measuring what we really care about w.r.t increasing IQ) at a population level.
Then does that suggest that at the individual level one could improve their IQ? If so, isn't this a highly controversial claim in your field?
Further, wouldn't it suggest that IQ is becoming a worse rather than better at approximating somebody's level of intelligence?
Your first question: It depends on how much experience one has had with standardized written tests. If one has had no experienced at all, then practice and coaching would certainly improve one's IQ score.
"In the present research two studies are used to investigate the relation between g loading of tests and practice (test-retest) and coaching (active teaching) effects. The data on practice do not support the hypothesis that the higher a test’s g loading, the less susceptible it is to preparation, but the data on coaching support the hypothesis. There is evidence that practice and coaching reduce the g-loadedness of a collection of tests." https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/abs/10.1111/1468-2389.00182
Your second question: I would say "better." People are spending more years in school (secondary + post-secondary), so most people have become familiar with standardized written tests. This is why the Flynn effect is leveling off. Fewer and fewer people are completely unfamiliar with them.
There's a cottage industry around people taking IQ tests over and over again with more and more test prep so they can brag about the one time out of ten they got 120
Thanks, Peter—very good article and an excellent summary of some of your prior writings as well on the evoandproud blog.
There are some linguistic studies such as Reali, Chater, and Christiansen 2018 that suggest language to decrease in complexity according to population size; complex linguistic traditions can only be sustained and passed on to succeeding generations among smaller populations. There are a few other studies that reach similar conclusions. I wonder how this might tie back into verbal IQ and cognitive development as a whole.
As an explanation, it seems simple and sensible enough to me for something I found confounding when I first realised it studying ancient languages as a teenager, which was that they are far more complex and powerful than any modern languages I've seen.
An interesting exercise is to compare English common in literature of the early 20th and 19th centuries to the English found in literature of today. The grammar and vocabulary are far more complex, enough that I've seen teachers say that young people now often have tremendous difficulty understanding it. Translations of ancient languages such as Latin and Attic Greek are far simpler now than in the 19th century, and comparing to the increasingly hard-to-find originals, far less accurate I would say due to the loss of English complexity and features considered archaic.
I wonder often how this loss of linguistic complexity in English, and all widely spoken European languages I'm familiar with, is affecting our verbal intelligence and cognitive development? My long held suspicion has been that English is in the process of beginning a split into multiple languages like Latin once did, as it already has several dialects and forms that aren't very intelligible among native speakers. It seems this would actually be good for cognitive development in the long term. However, I think communications technology might prevent this from occurring, as younger speakers lose native dialects and adopt to the 'prestige' dialects.
Supposedly, screen usage is bad for neurocognitive development regardless of content (!), or so a few studies I've read from a scientist called Stoyan R Vezenkov suggest. I would be very curious to see some of these intelligence studies repeated on younger adult populations that may have been most impacted by this. As always, there's a need for much more research!
Yes, most languages have shown a decline over time in the morpheme/word ratio, i.e., they have shifted from synthetic to analytic. That's a long-term evolution that may be linked to increase in population size.
But the simplification of English looks like something else. It's much more recent, has largely occurred over the past century and seems, if anything, to be accelerating. Whenever I publish an article, the editors often replace the present perfect and the past perfect with the simple past, apparently because many readers have trouble understanding those verb tenses. I see similar changes occurring in French.
It's a bit strange to see opposing results for forward digit span and backward digit span. Backward digit span is more challenging and has a higher g loading, so it should be a better measure of cognitive ability. But forward digit span has some g loading as well.
Your second point confirms my own impression (and thanks for the reference!). There has been a qualitative decline in new patents.
Thanks for the interesting article Peter.
I'm curious, your conclusion appears to be that the Flynn effect is in essence not "real" (i.e., not measuring what we really care about w.r.t increasing IQ) at a population level.
Then does that suggest that at the individual level one could improve their IQ? If so, isn't this a highly controversial claim in your field?
Further, wouldn't it suggest that IQ is becoming a worse rather than better at approximating somebody's level of intelligence?
Thanks again for the interesting piece.
Your first question: It depends on how much experience one has had with standardized written tests. If one has had no experienced at all, then practice and coaching would certainly improve one's IQ score.
"In the present research two studies are used to investigate the relation between g loading of tests and practice (test-retest) and coaching (active teaching) effects. The data on practice do not support the hypothesis that the higher a test’s g loading, the less susceptible it is to preparation, but the data on coaching support the hypothesis. There is evidence that practice and coaching reduce the g-loadedness of a collection of tests." https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/abs/10.1111/1468-2389.00182
Your second question: I would say "better." People are spending more years in school (secondary + post-secondary), so most people have become familiar with standardized written tests. This is why the Flynn effect is leveling off. Fewer and fewer people are completely unfamiliar with them.
There's a cottage industry around people taking IQ tests over and over again with more and more test prep so they can brag about the one time out of ten they got 120
Thanks, Peter—very good article and an excellent summary of some of your prior writings as well on the evoandproud blog.
There are some linguistic studies such as Reali, Chater, and Christiansen 2018 that suggest language to decrease in complexity according to population size; complex linguistic traditions can only be sustained and passed on to succeeding generations among smaller populations. There are a few other studies that reach similar conclusions. I wonder how this might tie back into verbal IQ and cognitive development as a whole.
As an explanation, it seems simple and sensible enough to me for something I found confounding when I first realised it studying ancient languages as a teenager, which was that they are far more complex and powerful than any modern languages I've seen.
An interesting exercise is to compare English common in literature of the early 20th and 19th centuries to the English found in literature of today. The grammar and vocabulary are far more complex, enough that I've seen teachers say that young people now often have tremendous difficulty understanding it. Translations of ancient languages such as Latin and Attic Greek are far simpler now than in the 19th century, and comparing to the increasingly hard-to-find originals, far less accurate I would say due to the loss of English complexity and features considered archaic.
I wonder often how this loss of linguistic complexity in English, and all widely spoken European languages I'm familiar with, is affecting our verbal intelligence and cognitive development? My long held suspicion has been that English is in the process of beginning a split into multiple languages like Latin once did, as it already has several dialects and forms that aren't very intelligible among native speakers. It seems this would actually be good for cognitive development in the long term. However, I think communications technology might prevent this from occurring, as younger speakers lose native dialects and adopt to the 'prestige' dialects.
Supposedly, screen usage is bad for neurocognitive development regardless of content (!), or so a few studies I've read from a scientist called Stoyan R Vezenkov suggest. I would be very curious to see some of these intelligence studies repeated on younger adult populations that may have been most impacted by this. As always, there's a need for much more research!
Yes, most languages have shown a decline over time in the morpheme/word ratio, i.e., they have shifted from synthetic to analytic. That's a long-term evolution that may be linked to increase in population size.
But the simplification of English looks like something else. It's much more recent, has largely occurred over the past century and seems, if anything, to be accelerating. Whenever I publish an article, the editors often replace the present perfect and the past perfect with the simple past, apparently because many readers have trouble understanding those verb tenses. I see similar changes occurring in French.
It's a bit strange to see opposing results for forward digit span and backward digit span. Backward digit span is more challenging and has a higher g loading, so it should be a better measure of cognitive ability. But forward digit span has some g loading as well.
Your second point confirms my own impression (and thanks for the reference!). There has been a qualitative decline in new patents.