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IQ decline and Piaget: Does the rot start at the top?
- nabla9 8y agoInteresting. >Piagetian gains at the bottom of the curve should not be dismissed as simply a phenomenon that offsets losses at the top. Consider the British results for Equilibrium and Pendulum. The decimation of top scorers means that by the age of 12 to 14, fewer British schoolchildren attain the level of formal operations. This means that fewer could think in terms of abstractions (without concrete examples), which limits their capacity for deductive logic and systematic planning. However, the fact that these losses are made up by gains over the rest of the “curve” means that far more of them are at the concrete generalization level. They are better at on the spot thinking (e.g. in playing demanding computer games). Their understanding of the physical world is limited to simple causation between two variables, but they can draw inferences from observations to make generalizations. [...] >The Piagetian results are particularly ominous. Looming over all is their message that the pool of those who reach the top level of cognitive performance is being decimated: fewer and fewer people attain the formal level at which they can think in terms of abstractions and develop their capacity for deductive logic and systematic planning. They also reveal that something is actually targeting that level with special effect, rather than simply reducing its numbers in accord with losses over the curve as a whole. We have given our reason as to why the Piagetian tests are sensitive to this phenomenon in a way that conventional tests are not.