Department of Psychology, Rice University, Houston, TX 77005, USA.
J Exp Psychol Appl. 2012 Dec;18(4):331-45. doi: 10.1037/a0030869.
Over a century of psychological research provides strong and consistent support for the idea that cognitive ability correlates positively with success in tasks that people face in employment, education, and everyday life. Recent experimental research, however, has converged on a different and provocative conclusion, namely that lower-ability people can actually be more effective performers within special environments characterized by features such as time pressure, social evaluation, and unpredictable task change. If this conclusion is true, it has extensive implications for practices such as personnel selection, training design, and teaching methods. The current article reexamines and reinterprets this research within the context of well-established resource theories of cognitive processing and skill acquisition leading to a less provocative conclusion that serves to reiterate the benefits of cognitive ability for task performance. Following this reexamination, we conclude by providing a research agenda for examining the determinants of skilled performance in dynamic task environments, including the following: (a) broadening the range of abilities and task difficulties examined, (b) considering the role of nonability traits and goals in skilled performance (e.g., personality, learning, and performance goals), (c) investigating the processes (e.g., problem solving strategies) that people use in complex environments, (d) developing research designs and analytic strategies for examining adaptive performance, and (e) investigating how best to train for adaptive performance.
一个多世纪以来的心理学研究为这样一个观点提供了强有力且一致的支持，即认知能力与人们在就业、教育和日常生活中所面临任务的成功呈正相关。然而，最近的实验研究得出了一个不同且引人深思的结论，即低能力者在具有时间压力、社会评价和不可预测的任务变化等特点的特殊环境中实际上可以成为更有效的执行者。如果这一结论成立，那么它将对人员选拔、培训设计和教学方法等实践产生广泛的影响。本文在认知加工和技能获取的既定资源理论背景下重新审视和重新解释了这一研究，得出了一个不那么引人深思的结论，即再次强调了认知能力对任务表现的益处。在重新审视之后，我们最后提出了一个研究议程，用于研究动态任务环境中熟练表现的决定因素，包括：（a）扩大所考察的能力和任务难度范围；（b）考虑非能力特质和目标在熟练表现中的作用（例如，人格、学习和绩效目标）；（c）研究人们在复杂环境中使用的过程（例如，解决问题的策略）；（d）开发用于研究适应性表现的研究设计和分析策略；（e）研究如何为适应性表现进行最佳培训。
