Part of the IQ test I took years ago involved memorizing and repeating sequences of digits. When I was growing up in the 80s, I had a large number of phone numbers memorized for friends, family, businesses I needed to contact regularly, etc. Presumably, memorizing dozens of seven- and ten- digit numbers regularly improved my ability to memorize long strings of digits.
Today, I no longer know any phone numbers besides my own and my wife's. And I know hers only because it's just one digit different than my own. I'm sure children are not getting any practice at this sort of thing.
So, does memorizing strings of digits have anything to do with how smart you are? If this is still part of IQ tests, then I'm not surprised raw scores are decreasing.
Working memory is tremendously useful for a wide range of intellectual tasks.
Imagine a CPU with an eternal spinning-rust hard drive and no cache, vs a computer with a 10x slower CPU and a 4MB cache. Which do you thing is more powerful at solving problems?
Of course working memory is important and should be tested in an IQ test. But so is being able to use tools to augment yourself and work around your weaknesses.
And having a specialized ability to memorize numbers is quite useless.
That might be part of the overall testing you did in which more than just IQ was being testing. In a normal barrage you might get tests for working memory, attention, etc. which are not IQ. This sounds like it’s testing working memory.
Part of the IQ test I took years ago involved memorizing and repeating sequences of digits. When I was growing up in the 80s, I had a large number of phone numbers memorized for friends, family, businesses I needed to contact regularly, etc. Presumably, memorizing dozens of seven- and ten- digit numbers regularly improved my ability to memorize long strings of digits.
Today, I no longer know any phone numbers besides my own and my wife's. And I know hers only because it's just one digit different than my own. I'm sure children are not getting any practice at this sort of thing.
So, does memorizing strings of digits have anything to do with how smart you are? If this is still part of IQ tests, then I'm not surprised raw scores are decreasing.