Controversy of Intelligence: Crash
Course Psychology #23

Intelligence- the ability to learn from experience, solve problems, and use knowledge to
adapt to new experiences.

Intelligence test- a method for assessing an individual’s mental aptitudes and comparing
them with those of others using numerical scores.

G-factor- the existence of a broad mental capacity that influences performance on
cognitive ability measures.

Factor analysis- a statistical procedure that identifies clusters of related items (called
factors) on a test; used to identify different dimensions of performance that underlie a
person’s total score.

Psychometrics- the science of measuring mental capacities and processes.

Savant syndrome- a condition in which a person otherwise limited in mental ability has
a exceptional specific skill, such as in computing or drawing.

There are five main identified components of creativity: Expertise, imaginative thinking,
venturesome personality, Intrinsic motivation, creative environment.

Perceiving emotions- being able to recognize emotions in faces, and even in music, film,
and stories.

Understanding emotions- being able to predict them and how they might change.

Managing emotions- knowing how to appropriately express yourself in various
situations.

Emotional intelligence also means using emotions to enable adaptive or creative thinking.

Eugenics- the science of improving a human population by controlled breeding to
increase the occurrence of desirable heritable characteristics.

A child’s mental age- The level of performance associated with a certain chronological
age.

Intelligence Quotient (IQ)- IQ = Mental age/Chronological age x 100

In the first half of the 20th century, intelligence test scores were used to enforce the
sterilization of about 60,000 people.

Poor African American, Native American, and Latina women were being forcibly or
covertly sterilized in large numbers as recently as 1970s.

They sterilized or simply executed hundreds of thousands of victims based on their
answers to (Pseudo-) IQ Test questions.
Language: Crash Course Psychology #16

Kanzi is the first ape to demonstrate that language can be acquired spontaneously
through observation.

He was also the first to show a rudimentary understanding of grammar, syntax, and
semantics.

Language- a set of spoken, written, or signed words and the way we combine them to
communicate meaning.

Humans have nearly 7,000 different languages.

Phonemes- short, distinctive sound units.

Morphemes- the smallest units that carry meaning.

Grammar- a system of rules that enable us to communicate with and understand others.

There are more than 616,500 words in the oxford English dictionary.

Infant- when a child still does not have the ability to speak.

Receptive language- the ability to understand what’s being said both to, and about us.

Babbling- beginning at about 4 months, the stage of development in which the infant
spontaneously utters various sounds, at first unrelated to the household language.

Babbling is not the imitation of the parent’s speech.

Without the exposure to other languages, a child will lose the ability to both hear and
create particular tones and sounds that aren’t part of his or her household language.

One-Word stage- the stage of speech development, from about age 1 to 2, during which
a child speaks mostly in single words.

By around 18 months, their capacity for learning new words jumps from about one week
to one day.

Two-word stage- beginning about age 2, the stage in speech development during which a
child speaks mostly in two-word statements.

Telegraphic speech- early speech stage in which a child speaks like a telegram- “go
car”- using mostly nouns and verbs.

B.F. Skinner believed language was a product of associative principles and operant
conditioning.

All human languages contain nouns, verbs, and adjectives, and humans are born
with an innate ability to acquire language, and even a genetic predisposition to learn
grammatic rules.

Aphasia- a neurological impairment of language, usually caused by left-hemisphere
damage either to Broca’s area (impairing speaking) or to Wernicke’s area (impairing
understanding.)

Broca’s area- area of the brain that produces speech.

Wernicke’s area- area that helps comprehend language.