Abstract
A battery of information processing measures and psychometric tests of specific and general cognitive abilities was administered to a sample of 105 individuals which included 34 monozygotic and 13 dizygotic reared apart twin pairs or triplets. Correlations between information processing parameters and psychometric abilities as well as twin resemblances for the information processing parameters were examined. In a principal components analysis of the information processing parameters, three components were identified which accounted for 67% of the total variation; Overall Speed of Response (OSR), Speed of Information Processing (SIP), and Speed of Spatial Processing (SSP). OSR was significantly correlated with WAIS IQ, and psychometric measures of verbal reasoning, spatial ability, and perceptual speed and accuracy. SIP was significantly correlated with WAIS IQ, measures of verbal reasoning, and one of the perceptual speed and accuracy measures. SSP was significantly correlated with measures of both spatial ability and perceptual speed and accuracy. Due to the small size of the dizygotic twin sample, no strong conclusions could be drawn regarding the magnitude of their resemblance. The correlation between component scores of reared apart monozygotic twins was significant for OSR, but not for SIP or SSP.
| Original language | English (US) |
|---|---|
| Pages (from-to) | 239-258 |
| Number of pages | 20 |
| Journal | Intelligence |
| Volume | 8 |
| Issue number | 3 |
| DOIs | |
| State | Published - 1984 |
Bibliographical note
Funding Information:In recent research in cognitive psychology moderate, but consistent, relationships between measures of the rate with which an individual performs simple *This research was partially supported by grants to the Minnesota Study of Twins Reared Apart from The Pioneer Fund, The Spencer Foundation, Harcourt, Brace & Jovanavich Inc., The National Science Foundation (BNS-7926654), and The Graduate School of the University of Minnesota and by NIH grant GM 28719. We would like to thank Alan Kuse for kindly making the results of the Hawaii normative regressions available to us, Daniel Keating for advice and assistance in constructing the information processing battery, and Robert Plomin for critically reviewing an earlier draft of this paper.