No Spearman's Law of Diminishing Returns for the working memory and intelligence relationship

Abstract

Spearman's Law of Diminishing Returns (SLODR) holds that correlation between general (g)/fluid (Gf) intelligence factor and other cognitive abilities weakens with increasing ability level. Thus, cognitive processing in low ability people is most strongly saturated by g/Gf, whereas processing in high ability people depends less on g/Gf. Numerous studies demonstrated that low g is more strongly correlated with crystallized intelligence/creativity/processing speed than is high g, however no study tested an analogous effect in the case of working memory (WM). Our aim was to investigate SLODR for the relationship between Gf and WM capacity, using a large data set from our own previous studies. We tested alternative regression models separately for three types of WM tasks that tapped short-term memory storage, attention control, and relational integration, respectively. No significant SLODR effect was found for any of these tasks. Each task shared with Gf virtually the same amount of variance in the case of low- and high-ability people. This result suggests that Gf and WM rely on one and the same (neuro)cognitive mechanism.