Bias in mental testing

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…er portions of the population - the human population, that is. Perhaps, as a side-effect, the quality of web-based discussion will rise. . From Arthur Jensen's 1980 book Bias in Mental Testing (pp157-158): Gestalt Completion. Familiar words and objects are shown in various degrees of "mutilation" and the subject must infer what the word or object is. Performance is scored according to the average time taken per item or the number of items completed within a given time limit. The difficulty of any given item is a function of its familiarity and the extent of the "mutilation"; these can be varied independently in making up items. ... Gestalt completion items, which are known to be a good measure of the general intelligence factor (as well as of a small group factor labeled speed of closure), merit further experimental investigation in their…

…ving behavior, transfer of learning from one problem situation to somewhat different situations, and capacity to acquire abstract or relational concepts. (Arthur Jensen. Bias in Mental Testing. http://www.amazon.com/Bias-Mental-Testing-Arthur-Jensen/dp/0... From the section "Animal Intelligence".) . Perhaps trial-and-error should be classed as a subset of accidental discovery -- e.g. there would be myriad ways of accidentally discovering, one of which would be the motivation-driven trial-and-error. Place a chicken on one side of a limited-length chain-link fence, and food on the other side, and the chicken will use the sheer force of its hunger-drive to discover how to get to the food. It has a motivation to get to the food, but it cannot mentally-resonate with the spatial processes -- the distance, the fence, gravity, etc. -- that are ke…