Fluid Intelligence has Made the Most Gains

So which kinds of intellectual performance have been pushed upward by the better environments of recent decades? Surprisingly, the steepest gains have not been found in the concrete skills that are directly taught in school, such as general knowledge, arithmetic, and vocabulary. They have been found in the abstract, fluid kinds of intelligence, the ones tapped by similarity questions (“What do an hour and a year have in common?”), analogies (“BIRD is to EGG as TREE is to what?”), and ...

 Benefits of Open-Ended Playtime

Studies show that, compared with controls, kids allowed a specific type of open-ended play time were: • More creative. On average they came up with three times as many nonstandard creative uses for specific objects (a standard lab measure) as did controls. • Better at language. The children’s use of language was more facile. They displayed a richer store of vocabulary and a more varied use of words. • Better at problem solving. This is fluid intelligence, one of the basic...

 Children are Scientists

Thousands of experiments confirm that babies learn about their environment through a series of increasingly self-corrected ideas. They experience sensory observations, make predictions about what they observe, design and deploy experiments capable of testing their predictions, evaluate their tests, and add that knowledge to a self-generated, growing database. The style is naturally aggressive, wonderfully flexible, and annoyingly persistent. They use fluid intelligence to extract information,...

 Using the n-back Game to Improve Children's IQ

Scientists typically describe intelligence as consisting of two distinct components: fluid intelligence and crystallized intelligence. Fluid intelligence refers to the general ability to solve new problems and recognize unfamiliar patterns. Crystallized intelligence, by contrast, consists of particular kinds of knowledge. When children learn to count, for instance, they show gains on crystallized intelligence, even as their fluid intelligence remains constant. Scientists have typically regar...