Lemos, Gina C.Peixoto, Francisco José BritoAlmeida, Leandro da Silva2020-02-132020-02-132020European Review of Applied Psychology Doi: 10.1016/j.erap.2020.10052311629088http://hdl.handle.net/10400.12/7402tOver the past century there has been an extensive debate in Psychology over whether intelligencestructure is best represented through a single general ability, multiple specific abilities, or a hierar-chical structure of abilities. This study aims at contributing to this debate through an analysis of thedimensional structure of a cognitive abilities’ battery aiming to evaluate, in combination, differentiatedcognitive processes of increasing complexity (comprehension, reasoning, and problem solving) throughitems of different contents (verbal, numerical, and spatial). A Portuguese representative sample of 2546adolescents enrolled in secondary education participated in the study. Confirmatory factor analyses werecarried out and the results showed that: (1) the hierarchical model is the only presenting an acceptablefit to the data (RMSEA = .07; CFI = .96; TLI = .92), (2) the existence of specific factors cannot be neglected,and (3) contents of the subtests assume relevance to explain the levels of adolescents’ cognitive per-formance. These results are discussed taking into account the contribution of school experience for thedevelopment and differentiation of adolescents’ cognitive abilities.engIntelligence cognitiveAbilities IntelligenceStructureCHC ModelAdolescencejournal article10.1016/j.erap.2020.100523