The contribution of cognitive psychology to the study of human intelligence

Cognitive Psychology (CP) in the last 50 years has shown impressive development, producing a large body of data mainly concerned with specific elements of the complex cognitive architecture of the mind. The focus on single processes, in large part necessarily narrow and detailed, has not prevented the development of general concepts, paradigms, and models that can be useful to all areas of psychology. In fact, since the mind's operations typically studied by CP, such as memory, attention, language, reasoning, and so on, are the basis for every psychological activity and behaviour, their scientific analysis can be used by other associated areas of study, for example Social Psychology, Clinical Psychology, Applied Psychology, Educational Psychology, Developmental Psychology, etc. Indeed, we are observing in these areas an increasing interest in concepts emerging from CP. The potential contribution of CP to the study of human intelligence is par- ticularly representative and interesting. In fact, the consideration of individual differences in cognitive abilities and, in particular, in intelligence is one of the main topics that should be covered by CP. But this has not been the case for many years. Despite its obvious importance, the concept of intelligence has been suspiciously considered by many researchers and in particular by researchers working in the cognitive area. An implicit consideration has been that the concept ``intelligence'' is ill-defined and lacks an association with a well-supported research tradition. The misleading and circular definition of ``intelligence'', as the dimension measured by intelligence tests, was considered representative of the theoretical poverty of the field. For this reason the study of intelligence was mainly left to psychologists working in the psychometric tradition and to a certain extent the field of developmental psychology. However there are now signs that the time has come for CP to make a more substantial contribution to the study of individual differences in intelligence and other related cognitive abilities.