As part of the Research Department's mission to communicate our research findings to the public, David Schroeder and Chris Condon continue to make presentations at professional conferences, write articles published in scholarly journals, and collaborate with other researchers.
The scholarly articles that we published in previous years have continued to receive attention in the professional community. As of early 2008, the Institute for Scientific Information’s Web of Science database showed that our 2004 article with Dr. Timothy Salthouse in Personality and Individual Differences has been cited in nine journal articles, and our article with Dr. Salthouse and Dr. Emilio Ferrer in Developmental Psychology has been cited eleven times, including citations in the Journal of Applied Psychology and Intelligence.
In December 2005 Chris Condon and David Schroeder
presented a paper titled An Examination of Spearman’s
Law of Diminishing Returns at the annual meeting of the
International Society for Intelligence Research. In this
paper we showed that this much-cited “law” does not
apply in the ability range that we study.
Our research on age curves and practice effects, with Tim
Salthouse, a leading researcher in the area of cognitive
abilities in adulthood, resulted in articles in Developmental
Psychology and Personality and Individual Differences in 2004
and has drawn attention from scholars in the area of adult
development. In this article, David Schroeder and Salthouse examined age curves for the Foundation's tests. Consistent with previous Foundation research, they found that vocabulary knowledge rises substantially between ages 20 and 50, whereas structural visualization and short-term memory decline. A recent book review in Intelligence cited
our work in the context of reinterpreting age-curve data
published by Warner Schaie, another top investigator of
adult cognition.
The second article, "Estimating Retest Effects in Longitudinal Assessments of Cognitive Functioning in Adults Between 18 and 60 Years of Age," was published in Developmental Psychology, the top journal in the area of behavioral development. In this article, Salthouse, Schroeder, and Emilio Ferrer, a colleague of Salthouse, examined the influence of practice effects in test-retest data and the relationship of this to estimation of age differences. They found that when practice effects are taken into account, the age curves from longitudinal data show declines in adulthood similar to those found in cross-sectional data, as in the earlier Schroeder and Salthouse article.
In December 2004, Chris Condon and David Schroeder presented a paper titled Memory for Design: An Overlooked Mental Ability at the annual meeting of the International Society for Intelligence Research. In this paper they showed that the Foundation's Memory for Design test predicts a number of educational and occupational criteria, including years of education and choice of major and occupation. They then showed that these relationships are distinct from the much-cited influence of a general ability factor (g). An elaboration on this topic can be found here.
In 2004 Nikolaus Bezruczko, who served the Research
Department as a consultant for our artistic judgment
project, and his wife, Ambra Vimercati, published an
article in Leonardo, a journal for art and technology. In
this article, they discussed how the Foundation’s Visual
Designs Test, which uses abstract images, and their new
test with figurative images, have made progress beyond
prior measures of artistic judgment.
Finally, in early 2004 Ian Deary, an eminent individual-differences researcher in the United Kingdom, and his associates published a reanalysis of our data on sensory discrimination (Pitch Discrimination and Color Discrimination) and general ability in the American Journal of Psychology. Previously, Scott Acton, a research assistant, and David Schroeder published these data in an article in Intelligence in 2001.
