Impulsivity is not related to the ability and position components of intelligence: A comment on Lozano (2015)

Lozano's (2015) finding that impulsivity was only significantly related to the item-position effect of Raven's Advanced Progressive Matrices may provide important insight into the outcomes of previous research that reported a negative relationship between impulsivity and intelligence. We collected data from two large samples of university students to replicate the finding of Lozano and to further examine whether the finding can be generalized to another intelligence test (Horn's reasoning scale). Since executive attention has been found to show a substantial correlation with the position component of intelligence, measures of executive attention were also administered to explore whether the relationship between impulsivity and the item-position effect of intelligence is due to their overlap with executive attention. Our results indicated that impulsivity was not related to the position and ability components of intellgence. Executive attention showed the expected relationship with the position effect of intelligence, but showed only a modest relationship with impulsivity. We conclude that the relationship of impulsivity with the item-position effect of intelligence should be interpreted cautiously before further evidence is accumulated.