96 PRETEND INTELLIGENCEdo pretend prob lems in pencil- and- paper (or computer) formats, like
IQ test items, is itself a learned, if not- so- complex, skill.
John Raven wanted his matrices to test the “eduction of relations and
correlates,” which Charles Spearman had claimed to be the essence
of cognition. But research has shown how such cognition is exhibited in
quite simple brains, like those of honeybees and fruit fl ies. Crows have
been shown to be quite good at analogical reasoning. In human social life,
complex cognition is demanded by the constant novelty of rapidly chang-
ing situations.^28
Th is is why highly complex cognition is intrinsic to everyday human
social life, and it develops rapidly in children from birth. Research by
Alison Gopnik and others has shown, indeed, that complex cognition
can be exhibited by infants. Young children are able to draw inferences
from higher- order relations and use them to guide their own subsequent
actions and bring about a novel outcome.^29
More direct studies with adults have shown that IQ scores are un-
related to the ability to carry out complex prob lem solving in social and
practical situations. Stephen Ceci and Jeff rey Liker did an entertaining
study of betting at a racecourse. Th e paper was rather frivolously titled
“A Day at the Races.” But they found the gamblers’ predictions of odds to
be far from frivolous. Indeed, such predictions involved highly sophisti-
cated cognitive pro cesses requiring integration of values of up to eleven
variables, such as race distance, course conditions, weight carried, age of
the horse, number of previous wins, and so on. Unlike the spherical horse
prob lem mentioned in chapter 2, these variables were not just added or
subtracted from each other as simple sums. Instead, predictions took
account of interactions among the variables and nonlinear eff ects. For
example, the eff ects of weight would increase with distance, but more so
for wet compared with dry conditions. Again, this is variation being cre-
ated by interactions among variables— the kind of deep interaction men-
tioned in chapter 2. Th e researchers found individuals’ accuracy at such
predictions to be unrelated to IQ test scores.^30
In everyday contexts like the workplace, such cognitive inventive-
ness is almost always unrecognized by psychologists. In one study, Sylvia
Scribner recorded the quantitative cognitive strategies of dairy workers
in their daily work: taking and organ izing orders, procuring items
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