The Temporal Dimension of Intellectual Functioning:
An Ever Changing Dynamic
The ongoing, temporal nature of intellectual functioning, as well as its psy-
chological properties, its rich associations to the past and projections to the
future in the individual or collective memory is another critical dimension of
intellectual functioning (Newell, 1990). The very notion of the duality of at-
tention and processing, of self-regulation, or of progressive deepening, all de-
pends on an understanding of the temporal unfolding of a transactional
event. It is this temporal dimension that unifies intellectual functioning and
development. As demonstrated in several chapters (e.g., Alexander, chap. 10;
Labouvie-Vief & Gonzalez, chap. 9), intellectual functioning and develop-
ment are not inherently separate phenomena but rather two sides of the same
coin. One’s intellectual competence is evolving along the way of performing
an intellectual task (see Sternberg, 1999, on intelligence as developing exper-
tise). Thus, we can meaningfully discuss a functioning-development isomor-
phism at the microdevelopmental (e.g., children’s problem solving, Siegler,
2002; see Granott & Parziale, 2002) as well as macrodevelopmental level (e.g.,
intentional conceptual change and scientific discovery; Neisessian & Tha-
gard, 1999).
Temporal dimension implies a changing dynamics because the timescale of
an act places additional constraints on performance. Consider two experi-
mental conditions: a social judgment task used by social psychologists, and a
text comprehension or mathematical problem solving task. High workload of
a task demands more time to reach a satisfactory solution. The longer it takes
to think through a problem, the more likely one will experience a cognitive
overload (Just & Carpenter, 1992), or distress and disengagement responses
(Matthews & Zeidner, chap. 6), since one has to hold all relevant information
in working memory and update information on a continual basis (see also
Linnenbrink & Pintrich, chap. 3, for a discussion). To offset this constraint,
humans also improve their mental fitness with practice and organization, and
continually relegate part of cognitive control to the unconscious through
automaticity (Sternberg, 1985) and shorthand retrieval structure (Ericsson &
Kintsch, 1995). More importantly, with developing competencies come new
affordances in meaning and action, all the way to the point where an expert
chess player like Kasparov can generate a move in a split second that will take
years for a novice to figure out (see Newell, 1990, for a discussion of the prep-
aration–deliberation trade-off ). A challenge for researchers is to understand
how an initially conceptually demanding task becomes almost a perceptual
one, as one develops expertise (de Groot, 1978), and more importantly, how
expert knowledge is represented in such an embodied way that feeling, intu-
ition, and visceral reaction (gut feeling) become integral part of expertise
EPILOGUE: CONCLUDING THOUGHTS 423