ABSTRACT
For the past 10 years or so, I have devoted most of my scholarly energies to a critical survey of what the psychological and psychometric research community has accomplished, over the past 60 years, in its efforts to identify cognitive abilities and interpret the results. I have amassed an enormous bibliography—of somewhere near ten thousand items. About 25% of these items concern the methodology of test construction and factor analysis. Another 25%, that is, upwards of 2,500, represent empirical studies of cognitive abilities using factor analysis. Except for a miscellany of items that are hard to classify, the remainder have to do with correlational studies, developmental studies, and studies from experimental cognitive psychology that I consider to be relevant to the interpretation of cognitive abilities. From all this material, with suitable reanalyses of a selected set of empirical factor-analytic studies, I have hoped to assemble, between the covers of a book, a synthesis of present knowledge about cognitive abilities in a number of respects: (a) the identification and characterization of cognitive abilities; (b) the structure and organization of these abilities; (c) the role of cognitive processes in abilities; (d) the development of abilities over the life span; and (e) the sources of variation in abilities as a function of constitutional and environmental variables. Arriving at such a synthesis has turned out to be a formidable enterprise, perhaps eventually beyond my capabilities or indeed beyond the capabilities of any one scholar. Nevertheless, I believe I will be able to accomplish a major part of it.
