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AGE AND BEHAVIOR: INTELLIGENCE – ORGANIZATION OF ABILITIES

When there are many tests and many people tested with them, it becomes exceedingly difficult to organize the great mass of data and to impart meaning to it. There are mathematical methods of organizing data into structural groupings, based upon the degree of correlation among the different test scores. These methods, factor analysis and principal component analysis, result in groupings (factors or components) which are relatively independent of each other and are few in number, certainly fewer than the number of tests that were used. These methods, therefore, help determine constellations of mental abilities that are sufficiently sizable to account for, and describe much of, the individual differences in scores on a test battery. There have been two general goals implicit in the aging studies that have utilized such methods of organizing intelligence test data. One is simply to describe what constellations of intelligence characterize older groups of people; the other is to determine whether or not these constellations change with age. The studies are very difficult to summarize because of their diversity, but several concepts seem to persist throughout. The single most important element in the organization of intelligence is general ability. It is overall ability, rather than any one specific ability, that most distinguishes one person from another. This is about as true for old people as it is for young, but there is a difference of opinion as to whether the general abilities of old and young are made up of the same type of test score organizations. For reviews of these studies and details not presented here, see Botwinick (1967) and Matarazzo (1972). *256\220\8*