European researchers base their controversial assertion on reaction times (RT) to visual stimuli given as tests to people from the late 1800s to modern times - the faster the reaction time, they say, the smarter the person.
The Victorian era has been highly touted by historians as one of the most productive in human history-inventions, observations and highly acclaimed art and music from that time still resonate today. The era was defined by Queen Victoria's reign in England which ran from 1837 until her death in 1901.
IQ tests themselves have come under scrutiny of late because they quite often reflect bias, such as education levels, societal norms, and other not-easily defined factors.
Other research has shown that overall health, nutrition levels and degree of fatigue can impact IQ scores as well. For this reason, the team has turned to RT as a means of evaluating what they call general intelligence, which they claim to be a measure of elementary cognition.
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Using such claims as a basis, the team looked at RT tests given by various researchers during the period 1884 to 2004, and found that RT rates slowly increased over the entire time period. For men, the increase was found to be 183ms to 253ms; for women the increase was from 188ms to 261ms.
The claims by the European team will undoubtedly be viewed as controversial-after all, no one has proved that reaction times truly are an accurate measure of intelligence.
Nor does the data suggest that those researchers testing people for their reaction times chose their subjects at random, or even in fact, performed the tests in the same way as everyone else.
There's also the consideration of the Flynn effect, where other researchers have found average intelligence levels rising since the Second World War.