Relações entre inteligência e funções executivas em crianças com altas habilidades/superdotação

Abstract

Currently, identifies increasing the number of studies investigating the relationship between intelligence and executive functioning, notably because of the importance they have assumed as predictors of academic and professional performance. However, there is still controversy in terms of the existence of correlations between these areas and if there is variability in the specific contribution of executive functions to these. On the other hand, studies have investigated child population, adolescent and adult within the normal intelligence range, without considering the extreme, ie, intellectual disabilities and high skills. Given the above, this study aimed to characterize the executive profile of children with high abilities / giftedness. 24 children, 12 of the clinical group and 12 in the control group were evaluated between 7 and 11 years of age, matched for age, gender, education and socioeconomic status. Both groups were evaluated from the Test of Coloured Progressive Matrices Raven ( TMPCR ) and subtests of attention and executive functions of NEPSY II . The results show that the group of children with AH / S obtained results qualitatively lower than the control group in tasks involving sustained attention, alternating attention and inhibitory control. Corroborating these results, it was found that the auditory attention and cognitive flexibility functions were identified as weight variables to define the group of children with AH / S and the control group. However, they performed better on tasks involving cognitive flexibility and creativity. Finally, there were no significant correlations between the subtests of NEPSY II and the Test of Raven 's Progressive Matrices.