3 PAPER-AND-PENCIL TESTS FOR SPEED OF INFORMATION-PROCESSING - PSYCHOMETRIC PROPERTIES AND CORRELATIONS WITH INTELLIGENCE

After more than 15 years of research efforts there is strong empirical evidence for an association of high psychometric intelligence with a high speed of information processing in Elementary Cognitive Tasks (EC Ts). A wider application of this mental speed approach to human intell igence, also to other areas of basic and applied psychology, could be largely facilitated through the availability of paper-and-pencil (PP) tests for mental speed. This paper describes the development and empir ical investigation of two new PP ECTs based on rationales of Sternberg 's short term memory scanning and Posner's letter matching, as well as findings for the already established PP test for mental speed, the so -called Coding Test. In three empirical studies the PP ECTs proved rel iable, they are substantially correlated with diverse measures of psyc hometric intelligence (up to -.70) and they displayed convergent valid ity with respect to other PP tests of mental speed but showed only med ium relationships with computerized ECTs. We conclude that these PP te sts allow an economical assessment of elementary speed of information processing as an important basis of individual differences in psychome tric intelligence.