Alex Burgoyne- PhD
- Senior Scientist at HumRRO
Alex Burgoyne
- PhD
- Senior Scientist at HumRRO
About
64
Publications
61,347
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2,097
Citations
Introduction
Hi, I'm Alex. I'm a cognitive psychologist who is fascinated by individual differences in cognitive ability, experience, personality, and motivation, and their consequences for skill acquisition and expertise. My current work combines experimental, correlational, and computational approaches to better understand the nature of intelligence and specific cognitive abilities, such as attention control, problem solving, placekeeping ability, and working memory capacity.
Current institution
Additional affiliations
April 2024 - present
Position
- Affiliate
Description
- Affiliated research scientist in Randy Engle's Attention & Working Memory Lab.
Publications
Publications (64)
Individual differences in the ability to control attention are correlated with a wide range of important outcomes, from academic achievement and job performance to health behaviors and emotion regulation. Nevertheless, the theoretical nature of attention control as a cognitive construct has been the subject of heated debate, spurred on by psychomet...
According to mindset theory, students who believe their personal characteristics can change—that is, those who hold a growth mindset—will achieve more than students who believe their characteristics are fixed. Proponents of the theory have developed interventions to influence students’ mindsets, claiming that these interventions lead to large gains...
Decades of research in industrial–organizational psychology have established that measures of general cognitive ability (g) consistently and positively predict job-specific performance to a statistically and practically significant degree across jobs. But is the validity of g stable across different levels of job experience? The present study addre...
Early work on selective attention used auditory-based tasks, such as dichotic listening, to shed light on capacity limitations and individual differences in these limitations. Today, there is great interest in individual differences in attentional abilities, but the field has shifted towards visual-modality tasks. Furthermore, most conflict-based t...
Mind-set refers to people’s beliefs about whether attributes are malleable ( growth mind-set) or unchangeable ( fixed mind-set). Proponents of mind-set theory have made bold claims about mind-set’s importance. For example, one’s mind-set is described as having profound effects on one’s motivation and achievements, creating different psychological w...
In our target article, "Which Working Memory Are We Talking About? N-Back vs. Complex Span Tests,” we analyzed data from 1,272 participants and demonstrated that complex span and n-back tasks lack convergent validity as measures of working memory. Evidence for their dissociation included 1) exploratory factor analyses revealing two distinct factors...
An assumption of many social psychology theories is that beliefs exert causal effects on behavior, and that interventions designed to influence beliefs can alter behavior as a result. These theories and their assumptions have increased in popularity in recent years among both academics and the public (Macnamara et al., 2023; Macnamara & Burgoyne,20...
Psychologists and neuroscientists often use complex span tasks or the n-back to measure working memory capacity. At first glance, both tasks require many cognitive processes attributed to the construct, including the maintenance of information amidst interference. Nevertheless, evidence for their convergent validity is mixed. This poses consequence...
Military selection tests leave room for improvement when predicting work‐relevant outcomes. We tested whether measures of attention control, working memory capacity, and fluid intelligence improved the prediction of training success above and beyond composite scores used by the U.S. Military. For student air traffic controllers, commonality analyse...
The overlap between Autism and Attention-Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder (ADHD) is widely observed in clinical settings, with growing interest in their co-occurrence in neurodiversity research. Until relatively recently, however, concurrent diagnoses of Autism and ADHD were not possible. This has limited the scope for large-scale research on their c...
Early work on selective attention used auditory-based tasks, such as dichotic listening, to shed light on capacity limitations and individual differences in these limitations. Today, there is great interest in individual differences in attentional abilities, but the field has shifted towards visual-modality tasks. Furthermore, most conflict-based t...
Each year, several thousand applicants take the Navy’s Aviation Selection Test Battery (ASTB), a test battery designed to assess whether an applicant has the cognitive capability to become a naval aviator or flight student. The battery is comprised of measures of crystalized intelligence (subtests for math, verbal, mechanical, and aviation and naut...
Scores on the Armed Services Vocational Aptitude Battery (ASVAB) predict military job (and training) performance better than any single variable so far identified. However, it remains unclear what factors explain this predictive relationship. Here, we investigated the contributions of fluid intelligence (Gf) and two executive functions—placekeeping...
Here is a shareable link to our article's full text: https://rdcu.be/dqMVI
We compare the validity of personnel selection measures and novel tests of attention control for explaining individual differences in synthetic work performance, which required participants to monitor and complete multiple ongoing tasks. In Study 1, an online sample of young adults (N = 474, aged 18-35) based in the United States completed three-mi...
Memory is essential for everyday life. The understanding and study of memory has continued to grow over the years, thanks to well controlled laboratory studies and theory development. However, major challenges arise when attempting to apply theories of memory function to practical problems in society. A theory might be robust in explaining experime...
Two meta-analyses examined the effects of growth mindset interventions. Burnette et al. (2023) tested two moderators and found that effects ranged from negative to positive. We (Macnamara & Burgoyne, 2023) tested 11 preregistered moderators and examined the evidence according to a well-defined set of best practices. We found major areas of concern...
Scores on the ACT college entrance exam predict college grades to a statistically and practically significant degree, but what explains this predictive validity? The most obvious possibility is general intelligence—or psychometric “g”. However, inconsistent with this hypothesis, even when independent measures of g are statistically controlled, ACT...
Pending approval for public release.
Pending approval for public release.
Please visit https://osf.io/7q598/ to download the Engle Lab's Three-Minute Squared Tests of Attention Control: Stroop Squared, Flanker Squared, and Simon Squared.
We offer three versions of the program:
1) Windows standalone (no E-Prime needed)
2) Mac standalone (no E-Prime needed)
3) E-Prime 3.0 run files
Additionally, each download includes an...
According to mindset theory, students who believe their personal characteristics can change—that is, those who hold a growth mindset—will achieve more than students who believe their characteristics are fixed. Proponents of the theory have developed interventions to influence students’ mindsets, claiming that these interventions lead to large gains...
Individual differences in the ability to control attention are correlated with a wide range of important outcomes, from academic achievement and job performance to health behaviors and emotion regulation. Nevertheless, the theoretical nature of attention control as a cognitive construct has been the subject of heated debate, spurred on by psychomet...
The self-generation effect refers to the finding that people’s memory for information tends to be better when they generate it themselves. Counterintuitively, when proofreading, this effect may make it more difficult to detect mistakes in one’s own writing than in others’ writing. We investigated the self-generation effect and sources of individual...
In this chapter, we discuss the measurement of working memory capacity and attention control. We begin by examining the origins of complex span measures of working memory capacity, which were created to better understand the cognitive processes underpinning language comprehension. We then review evidence for the executive attention theory of workin...
Process overlap theory provides a contemporary explanation for the positive correlations observed among cognitive ability measures, a phenomenon which intelligence researchers refer to as the positive manifold. According to process overlap theory, cognitive tasks tap domain-general executive processes as well as domain-specific processes, and corre...
Musical expertise exists along a continuum, with some musicians demonstrating far greater mastery than others. What accounts for this variability in skill? Could anyone, given the right conditions, reach a level of skill necessary to play for a first-rank orchestra? As a more extreme example, could anyone compose a symphonic masterpiece or play the...
Volume 1 of the Oxford Handbook of Music Performance is designed around four distinct parts: Development and Learning, Proficiencies, Performance Practices, and Psychology. Chapters cover a range of topics dealing with musical development, talent development, and chapters dealing with learning strategies from a self-directed student learning perspe...
A hallmark of intelligent behavior is rationality – the disposition and ability to think analytically to make decisions that maximize expected utility or follow the laws of probability. However, the question remains as to whether rationality and intelligence are empirically distinct, as does the question of what cognitive mechanisms underlie indivi...
Performance on a range of spatial and mathematics tasks was measured in a sample of 1592 students in kindergarten, third grade, and sixth grade. In a previously published analysis of these data, performance was analyzed by grade only. In the present analyses, we examined whether the relations between spatial skill and mathematics skill differed acr...
Process overlap theory provides a contemporary explanation for the positive correlations observed among cognitive ability measures, a phenomenon which intelligence researchers refer to as the positive manifold. According to process overlap theory, cognitive tasks tap domain-general executive processes as well as domain-specific processes, and corre...
The Mindset Assessment Profile is a popular questionnaire purportedly designed to measure mindset—an individual’s belief in whether intelligence is malleable or stable. Despite its widespread use, the questionnaire appears to assess an individual’s need for cognition and goal orientation more than mindset. We assessed the reliability, construct val...
A critical goal for psychological science in the 21st century is to foster diversity, equity, and inclusion in occupational contexts. One arena which will continue to benefit from a focus on equity is high-stakes testing, such as the assessments used for personnel selection and classification decisions. We define an equitable test as one that minim...
Multitasking is ubiquitous in everyday life, which means there is value in developing measures that predict successful multitasking performance. In a large sample (N = 404 contributing data), we examined the predictive and incremental validity of placekeeping, which is the ability to perform a sequence of operations in a certain order without omiss...
A hallmark of intelligent behavior is rationality—the disposition and ability to think analytically to make decisions that maximize expected utility or follow the laws of probability, and therefore align with normative principles of decision making. However, the question remains as to whether rationality and intelligence are empirically distinct, a...
For years, psychologists have wondered why people who are highly skilled in one cognitive domain tend to be skilled in other cognitive domains, too. In this article, we explain how attention control provides a common thread among broad cognitive abilities, including fluid intelligence, working memory capacity, and sensory discrimination. Attention...
The question of what individual differences in working memory capacity reflect has been a topic of intensive interest in research for several decades. This research has shed light on mechanisms underlying working memory performance. At the same time, the chapter authors argue this research has been myopic in two respects. First, it has largely igno...
Why do some individuals learn more quickly than others, or perform better in complex cognitive tasks? In this article, we describe how differential and experimental research methods can be used to study intelligence in humans and non-human animals. More than one hundred years ago, Spearman (1904) discovered a general factor underpinning performance...
Mindset interventions are designed to encourage students to adopt a growth mindset, reflecting the belief that one's intelligence can be improved in an effort to increase academic achievement. How do these interventions exert their effects? We assessed the effects of an online mindset intervention on mindset and four outcome variables, grit, locus...
For years, psychologists have wondered why people who are highly skilled in one cognitive domain tend to be skilled in other cognitive domains, too. In this article, we explain how attention control provides a common thread between higher-order cognitive abilities, including fluid intelligence, working memory capacity, and sensory discrimination. A...
Why do some individuals learn more quickly than others, or perform better in complex cognitive tasks? In this article, we describe how differential and experimental research methods can be used to study intelligence in humans and non-human animals. More than one hundred years ago, Spearman (1904) discovered a general factor underpinning performance...
One of the most replicated findings in psychology is the positive manifold between cognitive ability measures (Jensen 1998; Spearman 1904). That is, scores on different tests of cognitive ability are positively correlated, implying the existence of a g factor. Our research attempts to explain these relationships among broad cognitive abilities usin...
The Mindset Assessment Profile Tool is an 8-item questionnaire developed by the company Mindset Works, Inc. to measure mindset. We assessed the reliability, construct validity, and factor structure of the Mindset Assessment Profile in a sample of 992 undergraduates. The reliability of the Mindset Assessment Profile (α = .63) was considerably lower...
What accounts for the striking variability in how readily people acquire expertise and the ultimate level of performance they attain? In this article, we discuss sources of individual differences in skill acquisition. We begin by describing a first-of-its-kind case study of golf expertise: Dan McLaughlin’s attempt to make the PGA Tour through delib...
One of the most replicated findings in psychology is the positive manifold between cognitive ability measures (Jensen, 1998). That is, scores on different tests of cognitive ability are positively correlated, implying the existence of a g factor. Our research attempts to explain these relationships among broad cognitive abilities using a combinatio...
The question of what cognitive processes contribute to fluid intelligence (Gf)—the ability to solve novel problems—continues to be central in intelligence research. Here, we considered the contribution of placekeeping, which is the ability to perform a sequence of steps in a prescribed order without omissions or repetitions. Placekeeping plays a ro...
In this chapter we discuss the link between intelligence and problem-solving. To preview, we argue that the ability to solve problems is not just an aspect or feature of intelligence – it is the essence of intelligence. We briefly review evidence from psychometric research concerning the nature of individual differences in intelligence, and then re...
People with high levels of expertise in domains such as science, business, law, and music contribute to the prosperity of nations, the competitive advantage of organizations, and the well-being of families and communities. These individuals are often revered by society for their contributions—think of Marie Curie in science, The Beatles in popular...
The field of expertise is mired in a nature vs. nurture debate. Despite what we now know from behavioral genetics research about the underpinnings of human behavior, some expertise theorists continue to deny or downplay the importance of genetic factors ("innate talent") in expert performance. In this commentary, we argue that this viewpoint is nei...
It is well established that measures of reasoning ability and of working memory capacity (WMC) correlate positively. However, the question of what explains this relationship remains open. The purpose of this study was to investigate the capacity hypothesis, which ascribes causality to WMC. This hypothesis holds that people high in WMC are more succ...
How important are training and other forms of domain-relevant experience in predicting individual differences in expertise? To answer this question, we used structural equation modeling to reanalyze data from a study of chess by Charness, Tuffiash, Krampe, Reingold, and Vasyukova (2005). Latent variables reflecting serious chess activity and formal...
This chapter reviews evidence concerning the contribution of cognitive ability to individual differences in expertise. The review covers research in traditional domains for expertise research such as music, sports, and chess, as well as research from industrial–organizational psychology on job performance. The specific question that we seek to addr...
Mindset refers to a person’s beliefs about the nature of their abilities—whether they believe their ability in a given domain is malleable or fixed. We investigated whether a brief, online intervention could alter ability and non-ability traits, including mindset of intelligence, locus of control, challenge-approach motivation, grit, and performanc...
Multiple frameworks for categorizing spatial abilities exist but it has been difficult to verify them using exploratory factor analysis. The present study tested one of these frameworks-a 2 × 2 classification scheme that crossed the dimensions of static/dynamic and intrinsic/extrinsic (Uttal et al., 2013)-using confirmatory factor analysis with dat...
Mind-sets (aka implicit theories) are beliefs about the nature of human attributes (e.g., intelligence). The theory holds that individuals with growth mind-sets (beliefs that attributes are malleable with effort) enjoy many positive outcomes—including higher academic achievement—while their peers who have fixed mind-sets experience negative outcome...
The circumvention-of-limits hypothesis holds that the more expert (i.e., knowledgeable) the task performer, the less it matters for task performance whether that person has limited general cognitive ability. We tested this hypothesis using a knowledge-activation approach to manipulate knowledge experimentally. The criterion task, which we designed...
The debate over the origins of individual differences in expertise has raged on for over a century in psychology. The “nature” view holds that expertise reflects “innate talent”—that is, genetically-determined abilities. The “nurture” view counters that if talent even exists, its effects on ultimate performance are negligible. While no scientist ta...
Scientists identify 22 genes associated with intelligence.
Full Text: https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/intelligence-and-the-dna-revolution/
Substantial research in the psychology of expertise has shown that experts in several fields (e.g., science, mathematics) perform better than non-experts on standardized tests of intelligence. This evidence suggests that intelligence plays an important role in the acquisition of expertise. However, a counter argument is that the difference between...
Questions
Question (1)
We are conducting a meta-analysis on the effect of mindset interventions (i.e., implicit theory interventions; Blackwell, Trzesniewski, & Dweck, 2007) on academic achievement. We are asking for any data you may have relevant to this topic where:
1. The study administered a mindset/implicit theory intervention directly to students;
2. The study included a comparison group (active control group, passive control group, fixed mindset/entity theory treatment comparison);
3. The study measured academic achievement (e.g., grade in a class, exam grade, GPA or performance on a standardized test) of those who participated in the intervention/were assigned to the comparison group following the intervention.
We aim to be exhaustive, so please send us any paper or results that you think may fit the criteria, including posters, spreadsheets, manuscript drafts, papers in press, dissertations, theses, etc. If you are willing to share your unpublished results or data file (whichever is more convenient for you), we would be grateful if you would send it in any form to burgoyn4@msu.edu.
Thank you very much for your time and contribution.
Sincerely,
Alexander Burgoyne, MA
Department of Psychology
Michigan State University
Brooke Macnamara, PhD
Department of Psychological Sciences
Case Western Reserve University
