Abstract
Abilities are usually assumed to exist in a “positive manifold.” Experimental manipulations of physiological variables, however, suggest that negative relationships exist between certain of the neural processes contributing to simple perceptual-motor vs. perceptual-restructuring tasks. First-order correlative evidence of this phenomenon cannot be obtained because the between-individual differences in general ability level tend to exceed the behavioral effects of the intra-individual opposition between neural processes. Also, since statistical removal of the “g” variance induces bipolarity in the remaining variance, the second-order negative correlations are necessarily regarded as artifactual. A combined correlational-experimental approach is suggested to overcome this difficulty.
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This work was supported in part by the Dementia Praecox Research Project, Worcester State Hospital, and research grant HD 02557 from the National Institute of Child Health and Human Development, U. S. Public Health Service.
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Broverman, D.M., Klaiber, E.L. Negative relationships between abilities. Psychometrika 34, 5–20 (1969). https://doi.org/10.1007/BF02290169
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/BF02290169