APPLIED COGNITIVE PSYCHOLOGYAppl. Cognit. Psychol. 18: 481–489 (2004)

Book Reviews

Emerging models of intelligence

MODELS OF INTELLIGENCE: INTERNATIONAL PERSPECTIVES. R. J. Sternberg, J. Lautrey,and T. I. Lubart (Eds.). American Psychological Association, Washington DC, 2003. No. of pages373. ISBN 1-55798-971-0. Price £41.50 (hardback).

This book is not so much a guide to recent research in intelligence (for that purpose Sternberg, 2000bis to be recommended). Nor does it directly address the conflicting views on the ‘modal model’ inintelligence: the g-factor (this too is well covered elsewhere, cf: Sternberg & Grigorenko, 2002).Instead the present volume focuses on what models might be emerging or leading development in thefuture.

Some of the chapters address areas which have been of interest for a considerable period of time:Sternberg surveys research on his ‘successful intelligence’ construct (though see Brody, 2003 for analternate perspective) and Grigorenko surveys some of the literature on nutrition and ability. Otherchapters introduce approaches which have a strong standing in other areas of cognitive science, butwhich have not really been exploited in ability research. In this vein, Thomas and Karmiloff-Smithapply connectionist tools to the modelling of intelligence, making a strong case that such models, byforcing authors to be very explicit about how they think the mind works, greatly constrainspeculation, and enhance falsifiability. This approach has certainly stimulated much of the bestwork in the field of reading (Coltheart, Rastle, Perry, Langdon, & Ziegler, 2001), and its applicationto ability research would help integrate individual differences work into the wider framework ofdifferences in working memory models, models of frontal function, models of aging, and models ofneuropsychiatric deficits. It is to be applauded.

Howard Gardner contributes a chapter which is of value for clarifying his position, which is oftencited as being in opposition to the widely accepted hierarchical model of intelligence (cf. Deary,2000). He restates his meta-model or framework which has two main planks: (1) Because the brain isa modular system, intelligence could vary markedly from domain to domain, and (2), because thebrain is a learning system, levels of ability could, conceivably, mostly reach levels determined by thereward incentives of the environment, rather respecting any individual potential differences.Sternberg’s description of his own IQ during his Spearman lecture to the British Psychology Society(Sternberg, 2000a) could perhaps form the archetype for Gardner’s framework: Sternberg claimed hehad a high IQ initially, but lowered it on the expectation of an elementary school teacher, only toraise it again later on when a new teacher’s expectations supported this higher level of achievement.Gardner however then moves from this framework-level of possible worlds to the empirical levelwhere predictions must be made, and concludes that ‘ . . . life is not fairer in the intellectual spherethan in most other realms; some individuals will be ‘at promise’ in several intelligences, whereasothers will have, at most, a relative strength in one or other’ (p. 48). This will no doubt surprise somestudents in the area, and is not incompatible with the universal finding of correlations betweenabilities and high heritabilities. Elsewhere in the book we get excellent summaries of the reasons forthis correlation of abilities and its biological basis from Petril (genetics), Haier (brain imaging), andKunzman and Baltes (the aging brain). Haier, in his chapter on brain imaging in intelligencehighlights the intersection of intelligence research with work in fields as diverse as Alzheimer’s,schizophrenia and conscious processing. One noticeable gap in the selection of chapters is that thenewest evolutionary theories of ability such as the application of sexual selection (Miller, 2000) arenot covered.

The chapter by Van Geert exemplifies a second strand in the book: what might be called‘dynamic’ theories of intelligence. Research in this mode focuses on intelligence as a network ofsystems assembled to solve a problem, only to be broken down and rebuilt again perhaps severaltimes every few seconds in response to new demands. While it is accepted that a modular mind must

Copyright # 2004 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

generate global networks to integrate and coordinate behaviour which is coherent over space andtime (Cooney & Gazzaniga, 2003; Dennett, 2003), it remains to be tested whether or not differencesin the ability to recruit global networks of modules lie at the heart of differences in intelligence or aresimply one of the many cognitive functions enhanced by intelligence.

The book should find a place on library shelves, and it is to be hoped that research in the futureheeds this call for the formation of larger networks (of researchers), acknowledging the central roleof ability differences in a diverse realm of disorders as well as everyday competence and excellence.

REFERENCES

Brody, N. (2003). What Sternberg should have concluded. Intelligence, 31, 339–342.Coltheart, M., Rastle, K., Perry, C., Langdon, R., & Ziegler, J. (2001). DRC: a dual route cascaded

model of visual word recognition and reading aloud. Psychological Review, 108(1), 204–256.Cooney, J. W., & Gazzaniga, M. S. (2003). Neurological disorders and the structure of human

consciousness. Trends in Cognitive Sciences, 7(4), 161–165.Deary, I. J. (2000). Looking down on human intelligence—from psychometrics to the brain. Oxford:

Oxford University Press.Dennett, D. C. (2003). Freedom evolves. New York: Viking Press.Miller, G. F. (2000). Mental traits as fitness indicators: expanding evolutionary psychology’s

adaptationism. In D. LeCroy, & P. Moller (Eds.), Evolutionary perspectives on human reproduc-tive behavior (Vol. 907, pp. 62–74). New York: NYAS.

Sternberg, R. J. (2000a). In search of the zipperump-a-zoo. Psychologist, 13(5), 250–255.Sternberg, R. J. (Ed.). (2000b). Handbook of intelligence. New York, NY, US: Cambridge University

Press.Sternberg, R. J., & Grigorenko, E. L. (Eds.). (2002). The general factor of intelligence: How general

is it? Mahwah, NJ, US: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates.

TIMOTHY BATESMacquarie Centre for Cognitive Science, Australia

Published online in Wiley InterScience(www.interscience.wiley.com) DOI: 10.1002/acp.998

The evolving evolutionary account of thinking

EVOLUTION AND THE PSYCHOLOGY OF THINKING: THE DEBATE. David E. Over (Ed.).Hove and New York, Psychology Press, 2003. No. of pages 246. ISBN 1-84169-285-9. Price £39.95.

There was a self-proclaimed revolution in the psychology of thinking at the end of the 1980s andbeginning of the 1990s. Up until that point, two things had seemed clear. First, humans reasoned inways that fell well short of normative standards of rationality in many ways, relying instead onsimple heuristics which often led to error. Second, performance on any particular reasoning taskdepended strongly on the way the task was framed, leading to a confusing mass of ‘content’ andformat’ effects which were documented descriptively but hard to explain in any non-post hoc way.

The revolution came mostly, though not exclusively, from evolutionary psychologists. In a nowemblematic paper in Cognition, Cosmides (1989) showed that performance on the legendary Wasonselection task was dramatically affected by couching the problem in terms of a social contract. Thetask involves choosing which of several pieces of information would be needed to falsify a statedprinciple. People generally choose confirmatory information but fail to investigate data that wouldpotentially falsify the rule. Cosmides showed that when the task is framed as a social contract (‘ifyou take the benefit, you must pay the cost’), people are much more falsficatory in their choices,seeking out individuals who have taken the benefit to see if they are paying the cost. Cosmides andcolleagues used this finding to make several claims; that natural selection had designed the way we

482 Book reviews

Copyright # 2004 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd. Appl. Cognit. Psychol. 18: 481–489 (2004)