Scientists are calling for a new way of testing intelligence. As the internet cuts the need for the brain to store facts, “working memory” - our ability to retain and juggle information for brief periods - could be as much a measure of modern mental abilities as traditional IQ tests.

For decades psychologists, teachers and employers have relied on IQ testing to assess people’s learning potential. The tests measure problem-solving ability and a person’s capacity for abstract reasoning.

Now, however, scientists are suggesting that short-term or working memory is a better and simpler measure of the skills modern youngsters will need in school and in their eventual careers.

Tracy Alloway, director of the centre for memory and learning at Stirling University, is to release the latest research suggesting that tests of children’s working memory helped predict their grades more accurately than IQ tests.

“Working memory measures our ability to process and remember short-term information. It’s about how well we juggle different thoughts and tasks,” she said.

“There is a great deal of variation between different individuals and it is becoming clear that it is a much better way of predicting academic attainment.”

Such findings are likely to prove controversial, especially as Alloway claims that testing working memory also avoids the cultural bias built into IQ tests.

Such bias has been blamed, for example, for the way different racial groups achieve significant variations in their average scores.

In her latest research Alloway gave working memory and IQ tests to 98 children aged 4.3 to 5.7 years in full-time preschool education.

Recently, six years on, she revisited the children, now aged 10 and 11, asking them to take a battery of tests to measure working memory and IQ.

She said: “Critically, we find that working memory at the start of formal education is a more powerful predictor of subsequent academic success than IQ.” Alloway’s research is due to be published in the Journal of Experimental Child Psychology.

Some link psychology’s new focus on short-term memory with the rise of the internet and other electronic databases which makes the ability to juggle facts and figures more important than remembering them for long periods.

Alloway believes there are other factors at work too. “Working memory assesses people’s ability to process information and keep track of complex tasks, so it is relevant to many aspects of modern lifestyles,” she said.

Other psychologists believe IQ tests still have a lot to offer. Robert Logie, professor of human cognitive neuroscience at Edinburgh University and an expert in working memory, said measuring IQ gave a far more complete view of a person’s all-round mental abilities.

He said: “There are many aspects to intelligence, and working memory is important but it is far from being the whole story.”

James Flynn, a New Zealand psychologist, has found that the IQ scores of populations in developed countries have been rising by three points a decade for the past century.

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