? Recent Studies of intelligence indicate a dominant role of basic information processing, such as that involved in tasks measuring processing speed, working memory, and certain long-term memory processes, in human intelligence. The bottom-up notion of intelligence gives rise to an entirely new perspective from which the intellectual development of school children, particularly children identified to have mild mental retardation, can be examined. Moreover, since the basic information processing components seem to involve minimum formal education and have little cultural bearing, they are likely to be the universal determinants of intellectual growth in different cultures. The proposed study intends to investigate the influence of basic information processing on the intellectual development of primary school children who are identified to have mild mental retardation in different cultural settings. More specifically, we plan to conduct a study both in the US and in Mainland China to test groups of children with mild mental retardation (projected sample size: 50 in the US and 300 in China) and groups of school children without mild mental retardation (projected sample size: 50 in the US and 700 in China) for a span of 2 years using aggregated measures of processing speed, working memory, and long-term memory processing, together with conventional intelligence tests. We will examine whether there is a distinctive cognitive composition of intelligence for the children with mild mental retardation, and whether there are subgroups of children with mild mental retardation who are predominantly deficient in some of the basic information processing components, but not the others. Because the social, cultural, and educational environment for the children with mild mental retardation and that for the children without mild mental retardation in Mainland China are both different from those in the United States, the data obtained from the proposed study may reveal the impact of social, cultural, and educational environment on mild mental retardation. The proposed project is also intended as a pilot study for a larger cross-cultural study that we plan to conduct in the near future to address similar issues from a developmental perspective. ? ?
| Luo, Dasen; Chen, Guopeng; Zen, Fanlin et al. (2010) Modeling Working Memory Tasks on the Item Level. Intelligence 38:66-82 |
