High Intelligence:

>In all, it appears that highly intelligent individuals identify and apprehend bits of social and ecological information more easily and quickly than do other people, and their perceptual systems process this information such that it is activated in short-term memory more quickly and with greater accuracy than it is for other people. Once active in short-term memory, the information is made available for conscious, explicit representation and manipulation in working memory. Central characteristics of highly intelligent people are their ability to represent more information in working memory than other people and their enhanced ability to consciously manipulate this information. The manipulation in turn is guided and constrained by... reasoning and inference-making mechanisms... . Finally gF is associated with the ability to learn new information (Ackermann, 1986, 1988). When high fluid intelligence and strong long-term memory system is combined with an interest in seeking novel experiences, the result is the aquisition of a large store of crytallized knowledge, gC, over the life span (Bates & Shieles, 2003; Cattell, 1963; Horn, 1968; Li et al., 2004).<

David C. Geary, The Origin of Mind, 2005