For over a century, the standard view in the field of human intelligence has been that there is a ‘general intelligence’ that permeates all human cognitive activity. This general ability is supposed to explain the positive manifold, the finding that mental tests with different content correlate strongly. Yet there is a lack of consensus regarding the psychological or neural basis of such an ability. Our recently published account, Process Overlap Theory, explains the positive manifold without proposing an all-purpose cognitive mechanism. As a consequence of the theory, the concept of IQ is redefined as an emergent or formative rather than a latent or reflective construct.
Kristóf Kovács is Junior Fellow at the Institute for Advanced Study at CEU. He obtained an MA in Psychology from the University of Szeged and a PhD in Psychology from the University of Cambridge. Subsequently, he was a Zoltan Magyary Postdoctoral Fellow at the Budapest University of Technology and Economics, and a Marie Curie Fellow at the University of Amsterdam. Currently, he is senior research fellow at Eötvös Loránd University, Hungary. His main interest is individual differences in cognitive abilities; his research bridges cognitive psychology, psychometrics, and statistical modeling.