86 Meanwhile, the field is witnessing a burgeoning of intriguing new “modular” hypotheses about frontal regions and their putative roles in mediating discrete cognitive operations.87 Some aspects of these new theories already appear consistent with the evolutionary cytoarchitectonic trends hypotheses (for example the role of frontal pole region 10 as reflecting a merger zone with influences on both dorsal and ventral trends), but a high future priority will be fuller integration of current concepts of reward-system function with cognitive process hypotheses. Research that will enhance understanding of functional
links between frontal systems and deeper limbic, subcortical and axial Inhibitors,research,lifescience,medical systems may be among the most promising directions, and may help to fulfill the legacies seeded more than 50 years ago by the pioneers of frontal lobe territories. Acknowledgments Preparation of this article was supported by the Michael E. Tennenbaum Family Center Inhibitors,research,lifescience,medical for the Biology of Creativity, and the Consortium for Neuropsychiatric Phenomics (NIH Roadmap for Medical Research grants UL1-DE019580). I also thank William Barr and Elkhonon Goldberg Inhibitors,research,lifescience,medical for historical notes and comments.
The modern study of intelligence is often dated back to the work of Charles Spearman, who scientifically
studied intelligence and proposed that it could be understood in terms of a general ability that pervaded all intellectual tasks, and specific abilities that Inhibitors,research,lifescience,medical were unique to each particular intellectual task.1 Modern testing
of intelligence, however, dates back to the work of Alfred Binet and Theodore Simon, who proposed the forerunner of the modern Stanford-Binet Intelligence Scales. 2 The work of Binet and Simon was brought to the United States by Lewis Terman from Stanford University, who devised the Stanford-Binet Scales.3 Another critical figure in the early testing of intelligence was David Wechsler, whose Wechsler Scales of Intelligence are today the most widely used in the world.4 Wechsler’s original scale differed from Binet’s in Inhibitors,research,lifescience,medical that, in AT13387 supplier addition to an overall intelligence quotient (IQ), it also yielded separate scores for verbal and performance measures of intelligence. A typical verbal item might present a vocabulary item, whereas a typical performance item might present a series of pictures telling a story that are presented out of order, and that need to be reordered so that the temporal sequence is correct. Binet and Wechsler succeeded in their measurements because they most viewed intelligence as based in judgment and good sense. However, before them, Francis Galton constructed tests of intelligence based on acuity of sensorimotor processing, such as visual, auditory, and tactile skills.5 Although Galton is often credited as being the first to take a scientific approach to intelligence, his sensorimotor tests did not prove to be very predictive of scholastic performance or other kinds of meaningful cognitive performances.