INTELLIGENCE

WHAT IS INTELLIGENCE?- IT IS THE MENTAL QUALITY CONSISTING OF THE ABILITY TO LEARN FROM EXPERIENCE, SOLVE PROBLEMS, AND USE KNOWLEDGE TO ADAPT TO NEW SITUATIONS.

Is Intelligence one general Ability or several specific abilities?

Psychologists have debated, should we consider intelligence as one aptitude or many? As linked to cognitive speed? As neurologically measurable? Yet, Intelligence experts do agree on this: Intelligence is a concept and not a “thing”.

Intelligence is a socially constructed concept. Cultures deem “intelligent” whatever attributes enable success in those cultures.

For example , in the Amazon rain forest, intelligence may be a gift for discerning which native herbs effectively treat particular diseases. In Western countries, it may be superior performance on cognitive tasks.

GENERAL INTELLIGENCE To find out whether there might be a general ability factor that runs throughout our

specific mental abilities, psychologists study how individual abilities to relate to one another. The statistical procedure:

FACTOR ANALYSIS This enables researchers to identify clusters of test items that measure a common ability.

For instance, people who do well on vocabulary items often do well on paragraph comprehension, a cluster that helps define a verbal intelligence factor.

GENERAL INTELLIGENCE A general intelligence factor that according to Charles Spearman and others underlies specific mental abilities.

Spearman granted that people often have special abilities that stand out. According to his research if you score high on one factor, you will typically score higher than average on other factors as well.

CONTEMPORARY INTELLIGENCE THEORIES Howard Gardner supports the idea that intelligences comes in different packages. He

notes that if brain damage is relevant in any case it will most likely diminish one factor of your intelligence, but certainly not the others. Howard studies people with exceptional abilities, including those who excel in only one. People with savant syndrome, for example, often score low on intelligence tests, but have an island of brilliance-some incredible ability in drawing, musical memory or computation.

SAVANT SYNDROME A condition in which a person otherwise limited in mental ability has an exceptional specific skill, such as in computation or drawing.

Using such evidence, he argues that we do not have an intelligence, but instead have multiple intelligences, each relatively independent of the others.

Robert Sternberg agrees with Gardner’s idea of multiple intelligences, but his triarchic theory distinguishes three, not eight, intelligences:

Analytical ( academic problem-solving) intelligence assessed by intelligence tests, which present well-defined problems having a single right answer.

Creative intelligence demonstrated in reacting adaptively to novel situations and generating novel ideas.

Practical intelligence often required for everyday tasks, which are frequently ill-defined, with multiple solutions.

The ability to perceive, understand, manage, and use emotions.

The four components of emotional intelligence are the ability to perceive emotions ( to recognize them in faces, music, and stories), to understand emotions( to predict them and how they change and blend), to manage emotions ( to know how to express them in varied situations), and to use emotions.

ASPECTS OF SUCCESSFUL EMOTIONAL INTELLIGENCE INTELLIGENCE

INTELLIGENCE AND CREATIVITY • Creativity is the ability to produce novel and valuable ideas. It correlates somewhat with

intelligence, but beyond a score of 120, the correlation dwindles. It also correlates with :

1. Expertise is a well developed base of knowledge. The more ideas, images, and phrases we have available through our accumulated learning, the more chances we have to combine these mental building blocks.

2. Imaginative thinking skills provide the ability to see things in a novel way, to recognize patterns, to make connections.

3. A venturesome personality tolerates ambiguity and risk, perseveres in overcoming obstacles, and seek new experiences rather than following the pack.

4. Intrinsic motivation is creativity’s fourth component. Teresa Amabile- “People will be most creative when they feel motivated primarily by the interest, enjoyment, satisfaction, and challenge of the work itself...”

5. A creative environment sparks, supports, and refines creative ideas.

Do people with big brains have big smarts?

Larger brain size may enable greater intelligence; greater intelligence may lead to experiences that exercise the brain and build more connections, thus increasing its size; or some third factor may be at work.

Findings on the correlations between perceptual speed, neural processing speed and intelligence.

Studies of brain functioning show that people who score high on intelligence tests tend also to retrieve information from memory more quickly, and to perceive stimuli faster than others. These difference are reflected in neurological studies that show faster brain response times.

IS INTELLIGENCE NEUROLOGICALLY MEASURABLE?

BRAIN ANATOMY BRAIN FUNCTION

• The Origins Of Intelligence• Plato, a pioneer of the individualist tradition wrote “The Republic that”

stating that NO TWO PERSONS ARE BORN THE EXACT SAME, but each differs from each other in natural endowments, one being suited for one occupations and the other for another

• The historical story of intelligence testing illustrates an important lesson: Although science itself strives for objectivity, individual scientists are affected by their own assumptions and attitudes.

ASSESSING INTELLIGENCE

• Alfred Binet: Predicting School Achievement• In the twentieth century France passed a law stating all children by law are required to

attend school. This came with a overwhelming amount of individual differences of intelligence for teachers to handle. Some children became incapable of benefiting from regular school and needed special classes.

• But How Could The Schools Objectively Identify Children With Special Needs?

• Teachers were misjudging and classifying children with academic slowness when in some cases it was due to the poor teaching style given by the teacher.

• Alfred Binet and Theodore Simon came up with the proposal that was called “ Mental Age” which was used to test the chronological age typical of a given level of performance.

• Ex: The average 9 year old child should have a mental age of 9, while if the 9 year old has a mental age of 7 then that is a sign that the child may struggle with schoolwork considered normal for their age

ORIGINS OF INTELLIGENCE

• Lewis Terman: The Innate IQ• Terman attempted to use Binets test, but saw it worked very poorly for children in

California. He adapted some of Binets original items, added others, established new age norms, and extended the upper end of the test’s range form teenagers to “superior adults”. This established the : Stanford-Binet.

• Which from this German psychologist William Stern created the famous: Intelligence Quotient (IQ) Test.

THE ORIGINS OF INTELLIGENCE

• There are different ways to classify test such as:

• 1. Aptitude Tests

• 2. Achievement Tests

• 3.Wechsler Adult Intelligence Scale (WAIS) / Wechsler Intelligence Scale for Children (WISC)

• The aptitude test is intended to predict your ability to learn a new skill

• The achievement test reflect what you have learned.

• The DIFFRENCE between the two are that aptitude predicts future performance while achievement assess current performance.

• A widely used intelligence test, David Wechsler’s scales consist of 11 subtest. It not only yields an overall intelligence score but separates, scores from verbal comprehension, perceptual organization, working memory, and processing speed.

MODERN TESTS OF MENTAL ABILITIES

HOW TO COMPOSITE YOUR IQ

• To be widely accepted psychological tests must meet three criteria: They must be: STANDARDIZED, RELIABLE, AND VALID. The Stanford-Wechsler tests meet these requirements.

• Standardization• The processing of defining meaningful scores relative to a pretested group.

Standardized test results typically form a NORMAL DISTRIBUTION, a bell shaped pattern of scores that forms the NORMAL CURVE.

• With this intelligence test have been improving. This phenomenon is called the FLYNN EFFECT who first calculated its magnitude which figures out a persons average IQ.

PRINCIPLES OF TEST CONSTRUCTION

• Reliability• Comparing your test scores to those of the standardizing group still will not tell us

much about you unless to the test is reliability. A good test must yield dependently consistent scores. To check reliability, researchers retest people using either the same test or another form of it. If the two scores agree, or correlate, the test is reliable.

Validity

PRINCIPLES OF TEST CONSTRUCTION (CONTINUATION)

THE DYNAMICS OF INTELLIGENCESTABILITY OR CHANGE

• If we retested people periodically throughout their lives, would their intelligence scores be stable?

• Developmental researchers have tried to discover factors that indicate the later intelligence of infants

• No test has proved successful to find this

• Babies who grew tired of looking at a picture and preferred to view a different one score higher on tests of brain speed and intelligence 11 years later, but the prediction is crude.

• After about age 7, intelligence scores generally stabilize. The stability of intelligence scores increases with the aging of the child.

EXTREMES OF INTELLIGENCETHE LOW EXTREME

• Mental Retardation these people have low test scores and difficulty adapting to the normal demands of the independent living.

• More males than females (about 50% more)

• Down Syndrome a disorder of varying severity caused by an extra chromosome 21 in the person’s genetic makeup.

• More modern views on people with mental retardation have evolved, people with these conditions can maintain jobs and perform activities to a certain extent

EXTREMES OF INTELLIGENCE (CONT.)THE HIGH EXTREME

• “whiz kids” who develop mentally more rapidly than others

• Sho Yano: played Mozart by age 4, aced the SAT at age 8, and graduated from Loyola University at age 12.

• There are critics to the “gifted child programs,” saying that these kids are often segregated from others.

• “One does not need to hang labels on children to affirm their special talents”

GENETIC AND ENVIRONMENTAL INFLUENCES ON INTELLIGENCE

• Are our intellectual abilities molded by environment or are they inherited there is evidence and criticism for both

sides.

• If it is true that our intellectual abilities come from our parents; or through our genes, then the families with strong intellectual genes would always dominate the

social structure but if they come from our environment then the severely disadvantaged children would always

end up on the other side of the spectrum

GENETIC INFLUENCES AND ENVIRONMENTAL INFLUENCES ON INTELLIGENCE

• Do people who share similar genetic make up share similar intellectual abilities?

• Across studies of 10,000 sets the intelligence test scores of identical twins reared together are very

similar in variation to the test scores of one person who takes the test twice.

GENETIC INFLUENCES

Identical twins have brains that are similar in areas that are associated with spacial and verbal intelligence. There is a gene that can be added before birth that can contribute to a persons intelligence level. That helps to create a neural receptor that is involved in memory.

Studies show that with age mental similarities between adopted children and their adopted families disappear as biological parental similarities. By adulthood the correlation is slim to none.

Heritability: It does mean how much intelligence comes from your parents, it means ( when you look at why intelligence varies) it’s the percent of variation that comes from genes.

Our genes shape ours experiences and our experiences shape who we are. Genes and environment correlate.

ENVIRONMENTAL INFLUENCES• Early Interventions Effects

• Early intervention consist of things like responding to babies when they cry, get upset or misbehave. Interacting with babies, such as playing vocal games or, imitating them.

• Mcvicker Hunt did a study on a Persian orphanage. Studies show that when babies did not receive early intervention, they couldn’t sit up by age 2, and could not walk by age 4. Babies who did receive early intervention could name more than 50 body parts and objects by 22 months.

• Hunts findings show the importance of environment and the effects of extreme disadvantage.

• The effects of genes can override the effects of environment and vice versa.

ENVIRONMENTAL INFLUENCES• Schooling Effect

• We become more intelligent during the school year., and less intelligent during summer months.

• Higher intelligence equals more schooling higher salary. Higher family income contributes to longer schooling as well.

GROUP DIFFERENCES IN INTELLIGENCE TEST SCORES

• There are two different types: Ethnic and Gender

• Ethnics Similarities and Differences Effects

• Ethnic similarities start to diminish but the gap still exists. The ethnic differences are not just between all nationalities.

• The heritability effect in groups does not outweigh strong environmental factors.

• Research has shown that under the skin races are a lot alike.

• Superiority in intelligence of a ethnic group, rises and falls with time, for example: 2500 years ago it was the Greeks and Egyptians, and in the 18th and 19th century it was the Romans. Now in the 21st century the Asians seem to dominate.

• During this time the genes have not changed which makes it hard to tribute intellect to race.

• Girls

• Better spellers

• More verbally fluent and capable of remembering words

• More capable of knowing where things are

• Less likely to be in special education classes

• Better test score in math computation

• Boys• Better at spatial abilities, such as

fitting a suitcase into a trunk, playing chess, and doing certain geometry problems

• Better at verbal analogies

• Score higher in solving math problems

GROUP DIFFERENCES IN INTELLIGENCE TEST SCORES IN GENDER