Is cognitive ability a liability? A critique and future research agenda on skilled performance.

Abstract

Over a century of psychological research provides strong and consistent support for the idea that cognitive ability correlates positively with success in tasks that people face in employment, education, and everyday life. Recent experimental research, however, has converged on a different and provocative conclusion, namely that lower-ability people can actually be more effective performers within special environments characterized by features such as time pressure, social evaluation and unpredictable task change. If this conclusion is true, it has extensive implications for practices such as personnel selection, training design, and teaching at all levels.The current paper re-examines and reinterprets this research within the context of wellestablished resource theories of cognitive processing and skill acquisition leading to a less provocative conclusion that serves to reiterate the benefits of cognitive ability for task performance. Following this re-examination, we conclude by providing a research agenda for examining the determinants of skilled performance in dynamic task environments, including: (a) broadening the range of abilities and task difficulties examined, (b) considering the role of nonability traits and goals in skilled performance (e.g., personality, learning and performance goals), (c) investigating the processes (e.g., problem solving strategies) that people use in complex environments, (d) developing research designs and analytic strategies for examining adaptive performance, and (e) investigating how best to train for adaptive performance. Over a century of psychological research has provided a wealth of empirical support for cognitive ability as one of the most critical determinants of skilled performance. Setting aside the nature-nurture controversies surrounding the development of peoples' cognitive ability (Neisser, 1998), it is a well established and uncontroversial finding that cognitive ability can be reliably measured and is a consistent and strong predictor of important societal outcomes, such as work performance and career accomplishments (Campbell, McCloy, Oppler, & Sager, 1993;Hunter & Hunter, 1984;Neisser, et al., 1996; Park, Lubinski, & Benbow, 2007;Schmidt & Hunter, 2004), performance in academic environments (Binet & Simon, 1916;Kuncel, Hezlett, & Ones, 2001), and successful navigation of the complexities of everyday life (Gottfredson, 1997;Griener, Snowdon, & Schmitt, 1996). Certainly, theoretical disagreements about the exact nature and structure of cognitive abilities remain (e.g., see the exchange by Ackerman, Beier, & Boyle, 2005;Kane, Hambrick, & Conway, 2005;Oberauer, Schulze, Wilhelm, & Süß, 2005), and nonability traits such as interests, personality, and motivation are critically important determinants of performance (Schmidt & Hunter, 1998). Nonetheless, there is a strong scientific consensus that higher levels of cognitive ability yield positive benefits for virtually all types of skilled performance.A spate of recent research, however, has directly chall...

Mind-wandering, cognition, and performance: A theory-driven meta-analysis of attention regulation.

“…Alternatively, mind-wandering may be more common in tasks perceived as difficult, leading to individuals' psycholog ical and/or physical withdrawal from such tasks due to their inability to perform well (Bell & Kozlowski, 2002;Kane, Brown, et al, 2007). Thus, characteristics that influence the cognitive load of the task (e.g., task complexity and consistency; Schneider, Dumais, & Shiffrin, 1984) and person characteristics that influence the amount of resources available, such as working memory ca pacity, age (Krampe & Chamess, 2006), and the person's interest and engagement in the task (e.g., time-on-task; Bell & Kozlowski, 2002) are all likely important when examining the relations be tween attentional resources, attention regulation, and task perfor mance. This meta-analysis integrates mind-wandering theory with resource theories to help explain the differentiating effects of task and individual characteristics on mind-wandering and perfor mance.…”

Individual adaptive performance in organizations: A review

“…These findings echo the aforementioned results of training studies that pointed to initial skill acquisition as a mechanism linking cognitive ability to AP. They also highlight different conclusions regarding the effect of cognitive ability (i.e., positive, neutral, and negative) that may be drawn when different assessments of AP are used (i.e., absolute level of post‐change performance, post‐change performance trajectory, and post‐change performance decrease; see Beier & Oswald, , for an excellent discussion), a point we return to in greater detail later.…”

General mental ability and goal type as antecedents of recurrent adaptive task performance.

“…Further, to provide needed theoretical depth to our understanding of the nature of the relationship between GMA and adaptive performance over time (Beier & Oswald, 2012), we consider how people respond to multiple changes. Specifically, we note that it's well established that the response of an individual may evolve when exposed to a previously novel stimulus multiple times (Ackerman, 1988).…”

“…In addition, the present study begins to address recent concerns raised by Beier and Oswald (2012) noting a need to better understand how GMA influences performance over time.…”

“…In order to more fully realize the potential benefits of these approaches, we echo the concerns of Beier and Oswald (2012) and Jundt et al (2015) and encourage researchers to also consider the continuity of the pre and post change tasks. In the present study, we retained the same fundamental task structure and manipulated the relative importance of each parameter to D r a f t introduce an unannounced change.…”