PRETEND INTELLIGENCE 95childcare, driving on a busy road, team work at work or during play, and
so on. In perhaps the most thorough analy sis to date, Patricia Carpenter
and colleagues found little evidence that level of abstraction, as in the
complexity of rules, infl uences item diffi culty.^25
Carpenter and others have suggested that it is diff erences in working
memory that count. Th is is the sort of memory needed for holding in mind
information, such as one par tic u lar rule, while more rules are taken in and
then combined to solve the prob lem. Of course, anyone who does regular
multitasking (e.g., parents of young children) will be familiar with that kind
of prob lem and be rather adept at it. But attempts to demonstrate that it is
the basis of diff erences in test per for mance have been inconclusive. Besides,
as the American Psychological Association review group concluded, the
defi nition of working memory itself remains vague and disputed (see fur-
ther in chapter 7), and relations with IQ are still uncertain.^26 So, what ever
it is that makes Ravens matrices more diffi cult for some people compared
with others, it does not seem to be item complexity per se. So what is it?
COMPLEX COGNITION IN REAL LIFEIt is easy to look at the puzzles that make up IQ tests and be convinced
that they really do test brain power. But then we ignore the brain power
that nearly every one displays in their everyday lives. Some psychologists
have noticed how people who stumble over formal tests of cognition can
handle highly complex prob lems in their real lives all the time. As Michael
Eysenck put it in his well- known book Psy chol ogy, “ Th ere is an apparent
contradiction between our ability to deal eff ectively with our everyday
environment, and our failure to perform well on many laboratory reason-
ing tasks.”^27 We can say the same about IQ tests.
Indeed, abundant cognitive research suggests that everyday, real- life
prob lem solving, carried out by the vast majority of people, especially in
social cooperative situations, is a great deal more complex than that
required by IQ test items. Th e environments experienced by all living
things, indeed, are highly changeable and complex in a more dynamic
sense than static test items. Real- life prob lems combine many more
variables that change over time and interact. It seems that the ability to
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