An empirical investigation of domain-specific theories of preschool children's cognitive abilities.

摘要

The purpose of the present study was to empirically test two of the theoretical claims entailed in Feldman's and Gardner's contention that intelligence is domain-specific. These are that (a) the intellect is structured in terms of specific, relatively independent abilities and that (b) as a function of the specificity of intellectual abilities, many individuals exhibit different levels of competence in different domains.; The Spectrum Field Inventory served as the measure of the cognitive abilities studied. Consisting of six tasks, the Inventory measures mathematical, linguistic, artistic, social, musical, and mechanical abilities in 4-year-olds. The Inventory was administered to 42 4-year-old subjects during two 1-hour home visits.; Although the results of the study indicate that it is untenable to maintain the cognitive abilities measured have no relationship to one another, group scores on the Inventor tasks did exhibit a degree of distinctiveness that is inconsistent with the notion of general intelligence. That is, correlations among pairs of Inventory task scores were not consistently positive and high. Further, the degree of variability observed within subjects' sets of scores indicates that individuals often exhibit a range of competence across distinctive domains rather than a uniform ability. Taken as a whole, the results of the study offer support for the position that intelligence is domain-specific.