Jh. Kranzler et al., TASK COMPLEXITY AND THE SPEED AND EFFICIENCY OF ELEMENTAL INFORMATION-PROCESSING - ANOTHER LOOK AT THE NATURE OF INTELLECTUAL GIFTEDNESS, Contemporary educational psychology, 19(4), 1994, pp. 447-459
This study examined the speed and efficiency of elemental processing a
mong the intellectually gifted. Groups of gifted and nongifted junior
high school students were compared on several elementary cognitive tas
ks (ECTs) with no symbolic content and different degrees of requisite
processing complexity. After controlling for the potentially confoundi
ng effect of knowledge base on the ECTs, results of this study further
substantiated the significant relationship between elemental processi
ng, task complexity, and intellectual giftedness. Differences between
the gifted and nongifted groups on the ECT parameters increased monoto
nically with task complexity. Moreover, despite the fact that the ECTs
used in this study have no information content and require no higher-
order or metaprocesses for successful task completion, discriminant fu
nction analyses including the various elemental processing speed and e
fficiency measures correctly classified approximately 80% of all subje
cts. Implications of these results for theory relating giftedness to t
he speed and efficiency of elemental cognitive processes are discussed
. (C) 1994 Academic Press, Inc.