CHC cognitive abilities and expertise - Guest post by Ruben Lopez

Over on the CHC listserv there has been some good discussion of CHC cognitive abilities, SLODR, and the development of expertise. Ruben Lopez, a regular and thoughtful contributor to the IAP list, made the following post today. I liked it so much I asked if I could post it as a guest blog comment here at IQs Corner. Ruben agreed...thanks Ruben.

"I just ran across a discussion of CHC and SLODR in The Cambridge Handbook of Expertise and Expert Performance by Ericsson, Charness, Feltovich, and Hoffman (2006). (It seems that the findings on expertise and expert performance have important implications for teaching kids to become experts-well, at least proficient-in school subjects.)

About CHC and SLODR, Earl Hunt says, "Gf and Gc are correlated, which makes it possible to speak reasonably about g. However, correlations between measures of different types of cognitive abilities are highest toward the low end of the general intelligence scale, and markedly lower at the high end (Detterman & Daniel, 1989, Deary et al., 1996). This is important, as expertise is generally associated with high levels of performance.

Measures of Gf have substantial correlations with measures of the performance of working memory. A high-Gf person is probably good at keeping track of several things at once and concentrating his or her attention in the face of distractions (Engle, Kane & Tulhoski, 1999; Kyllonen & Christal, 1990). These talents are good to have during the learning phase of most psychomotor activities (e.g., skiing, riding a bicycle, playing tennis). However, they are much less needed once an activity has been learned. Laboratory studies of how people learn to do psychomotor tasks have shown that intelligence is a reasonably good predictor of performance early in learning but does not predict asymptotic levels of learning very well (Ackerman 1996; Fleishman, 1972).

... Some aspects of expertise, such as swinging a golf club, require learning a constant relationship between stimulus and response. Other aspects, such as the analogical reasoning typical of the law, involve varied mappings, the development of mental models of a situation, and extensive knowledge. Demands on both Gf and Gc never cease." (pp. 32-33)

CHC applied to the study of expert performance-cool."

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