1 Strategies for the Direct Enhancement of Intelligence Michael E. Martinez Joe M. Klunder Jeneen D. Graham University of California, Irvine, USA Paper presented at the 2010 Convention of the American Educational Research Association, Denver, CO This paper presents a conceptual basis for the direct enhancement of human intelligence. In decades past, researchers have attempted to enhance cognitive functioning, both directly and indirectly, through a variety educational interventions. These interventions have met with measurable, albeit modest, success (Martinez, 2000). In these studies, cognitive enhancement was commonly measured as gains in IQ scores or on measures of broad cognitive abilities. Among the most well-known interventions are Project Intelligence (Herrnstein et al., 1986), the Milwaukee Project, the Abecedarian Project, and Feuerstein’s Instrumental Enrichment. In this paper, we present a design for the direct enhancement of intelligence that is plausibly more powerful than previous interventions. One basis for this claim lies in the fact that the cognitive traits we target for intervention are known to have strong and direct associations with general mental ability (g). Such strong empirical relationships with g have not always characterized previous interventions; often, the design specifics arose from rather ad hoc considerations. A second basis for our claim is that the identified training components are known to be modifiable through practice. Research, much of it recent, has shown that several cognitive traits that sub-serve intelligent functioning are trainable through deliberate, directed practice. We concentrate on three such structuring traits: working memory capacity, inductive reasoning ability, and focused aspects of verbal reasoning. Psychometric studies have affirmed these three