INTELLIGENCE 22, 23-48 (1996) The Mental Speed-IQ Relationship: Unitary or Modular? ALJOSCHA C. NEUBAUER University of Graz, Austria VALENTIN BUCIK University of Ljubljana, Slovenia In his “specificity of mind” view, Ceci (1990a) asserted that mental speed-IQ relation- ships are only due to their sharing of a common knowledge base. According to the con- trasting “singularity of mind” view. the mental speed-IQ correlation should reflect general intelligence. We tested these two views by letting 120 participants perform a battery of paper-and-pencil elementary cognitive tests (ECTs): a modified version of Lind- ley’s Coding Test and two newly developed paper-and-pencil tests following the rationales of the Stemberg and the Posner paradigms. Three versions of each of these ECTs involv- ing different knowledge bases (verbal, numerical. and figural) were devised. Intelligence tests employed were Raven’s Advanced Progressive Matrices and the Berlin model of Intelligence Structure (BIS). In the bimodal BIS, three content-based components (verbal, numerical. figural), four operational components (processing speed, memory, creativity, processing capacity), and a general factor are operationalized. We obtained three main results: First. as expected, high speed of information processing in ECTs is related to high psychometric intelligence. Second, there is only weak evidence for ECT-intelligence correlations with the same content to be largest, which rather supports the singularity of mind view. Third, regarding the operational components in the BIS, mental speed in ECTs correlates most highly with the processing speed component. followed by the processing capacity component. Less prominent but still significant correlations resulted for the memory and creativity components. After about 1.5 years of research, there is an impressive body of evidence sug- gesting a moderate but significant relationship between psychometric intel- ligence and the speed of execution of elemental cognitive processes; that is, more intelligent participants display a higher speed of information processing (SIP) in a variety of so-called elementary cognitive tasks (ECTs; see Vernon, 1987, and This study was partially supported by the Slovenian Ministry of Science and Technology (Project No. 35-6261-058 l-95). by a fellowship granted to the second author by the Rector’s conference of the ARGE Alps-Adria, and by the help of the Austrian Institute for Eastern and Southern Europe. We wish to thank Petra Eppich, Gerda Klopf, and Elsbeth Sitzwohl for their help in preparing the paper- and-pencil ECTs and for administering the tests. Correspondence and requests for reprints should be sent to Aljoscha Neubauer, University of Graz, Department of Psychology, Universitatsplatz 2, A-8010 Graz, Austria. 23