Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

At dawn of cognitive science, it was hypothesized that performance on diverse sensorimotor tasks is rooted in unitarysensory discrimination ability that shares the same neural resource with complex cognition. A century of research yieldedinconclusive evidence. We modelled the factor structure for 33 diverse visual sensorimotor, memory, and reasoning tasks,completed by 234 young adults. Covariance structure models indicated two considerably correlated, yet statistically sepa-rate, sensorimotor abilities reflecting temporal vs. non-temporal processing. However, initially moderate relationships ofeach simple ability with reasoning disappeared when mediated by working memory, suggesting that sensory discriminationplays no explanatory role for complex cognition. These results were replicated in another study of 255 young adults, whoadditionally attempted auditory sensorimotor tasks. The latter appeared to be separate from temporal and visual abilities.Overall, sensory discrimination does not constitute unitary ability. Moreover, individual differences in complex cognitioncannot be reduced to sensory discrimination.