The Developmental Differences Of Item Position Effect And Its Impact On The Relationship Between Fluid Intelligence And Executive Function

The item-position effect refers to the dependency of the response to a specific item in a sequence of homogeneous items on the position of this item within the sequence.Previous research on the item-position effect in intelligence testing has been mostly focused on adults.Fluid intelligence,as the core thinking ability of human being,is the focus of attention in the field of psychology.Although measures of fluid intelligence are generally believed to be homogeneous,research on the item-position effect has shown inhomogeneity,and the observed item-position effect indicates that fluid intelligence consists of two components with different characteristics.The two different components have their own unique properties and may show different results in the relationship with other psychological variables.The relationship between executive function and fluid intelligence has always been a key issue in cognitive psychology,and exploring from the perspective of the itemposition effect may provide different results.The present research attempted to conduct two studies to explore some questions related to the item-position effect.The present study recruited children,adolescents and adults and they all participated in both two studies.The first study used 3 fluid intelligence tasks to measure the intelligence level of the subjects in the corresponding age group.The primary of the first study was to investigate whether there is a developmental difference in the item-position effect in intelligence testing.The second study used 8 executive function tasks to explore individuals' cognitive ability.We tried to explore whether the existence of the item-position effect has an impact on the relationship between executive function and fluid intelligence.The main results are as follows:(1)There are obvious developmental differences in the item-position effect: whereas the item-position effect was demonstrated in adolescents and adults,it was not found in children.(2)The item-position effect affects the relationship between fluid intelligence and executive function.The updating and shifting processes is mainly related to the itemposition component,while the inhibition process is mainly associated with the ability component of the fluid intelligence test.