TASK COMPLEXITY AND THE SPEED AND EFFICIENCY OF ELEMENTAL INFORMATION-PROCESSING - ANOTHER LOOK AT THE NATURE OF INTELLECTUAL GIFTEDNESS

This study examined the speed and efficiency of elemental processing among the intellectually gifted. Groups of gifted and nongifted junior high school students were compared on several elementary cognitive tasks (ECTs) with no symbolic content and different degrees of requisite processing complexity. After controlling for the potentially confounding effect of knowledge base on the ECTs, results of this study further substantiated the significant relationship between elemental processing, task complexity, and intellectual giftedness. Differences between the gifted and nongifted groups on the ECT parameters increased monotonically with task complexity. Moreover, despite the fact that the ECTs used in this study have no information content and require no higher-order or metaprocesses for successful task completion, discriminant function analyses including the various elemental processing speed and efficiency measures correctly classified approximately 80% of all subjects. Implications of these results for theory relating giftedness to the speed and efficiency of elemental cognitive processes are discussed. (C) 1994 Academic Press, Inc.