Construct Developed in Psychometrics to Determine Cognitive Abilities

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The g factor, or "general factor", is a construct developed in psychometrics to determine cognitive abilities. It is a variable that summarizes positive correlations among various cognitive tasks, which demonstrate an individual's performance at one type of cognitive task tends to be comparable to his or her performance at other kinds of cognitive tasks. The g factor typically accounts for 40 to 50 percent of the variance in IQ test performance, and IQ scores are frequently regarded as estimates of an individual's g factor rating (Kamphaus et al. 2005). The terms IQ, general intelligence, general cognitive ability, general mental ability, or simply intelligence, are often used interchangeably to refer to the common core shared by cognitive tests (Deary et al, 2012).
The g factor was originally developed by the English psychologist Charles Spearman in the the 20th century. Spearman observed that children's performance ratings across seemingly unrelated school subjects were positively correlated, and believed that these correlations were a result of the influence of an underlying general mental ability that would prove performance on all kinds of mental tests. Spearman believed that all mental performance could be viewed in terms of a single general ability factor, which he called g, and a large number of narrow task-specific ability factors. Today's factor models of intelligence typically represent cognitive abilities as a three-level hierarchy, where there are a large number of narrow factors at the bottom of the hierarchy, a group of broad, more general factors at the intermediate level, and at a single factor, known as the g factor, representing the variance common to all cognitive tasks.

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