INTELLIGENCE AND SPEED OF INFORMATION-PROCESSING - STATUS OF RESEARCH AND FUTURE

During the past decade the notion of a biologically based intelligence has provoked a considerable amount of studies on the relationship between intelligence and the speed of information processing. These studies have provided evidence for a negative relationship between psychometric intelligence and reaction times (RT) on several elementary cognitive tasks, i. e., more intelligent persons are faster in perceiving and processing information. This paper reviews important findings of this research, its theoretical explanations and critical aspects. On the basis of a more detailed description of studies dealing with confounding variables a future perspective of RT-intelligence research is developed.