Functional Basis of Intelligence
Intelligence
• One enduring problem has been our definition of
intelligence, which has undergone various changes.
Today intelligence is commonly defined as the capacity
to learn from experience and to adapt to new
situations. This approach has the advantage of being
applicable at various phylogenetic levels, but it does
not show the complexity of our current views.
• First, there is the question of measuring intelligence, a
bold idea at its inception early in this century and still
disputed today. Second, people with exceptional
intelligence pose a special problem.
A Three-Dimensional Model
• The most comprehensive multifactor theory to dateconsiders
intellectual ability in terms of three dimensions: how information is
processed, which is called operations; what information is involved,
which is called contents; and the results, which are called products.
These dimensions are subdivided into five, four, and six parts,
respectively, making a cubic model with 120 elements. These 120
potential intellectual abilities define the structure-of-intellect (SI)
model.
• The operations dimension has been discussed indirectly in the
chapters on cognition and memory. More than the others, it
concerns specific mental functions. One operation, for example, is
memory, which involves the storage and retrieval of information.
Another is convergent thinking, in which stored information is used
in a search for one particular answer to a problem.
Islands of genius: Savant syndrome
• After a 30-minute helicopter ride and a visit to
the top of a skyscraper, British savant artist
Stephen Wiltshire began seven days of drawing
that reproduced the Tokyo skyline.
Nonintellectual Factors
• Nonintellectual factors, such as persistence, goal
awareness, and a concern with social values, have been
stressed as well. Motivation and objectives may be
considered part of one's intellectual functioning,
together with the ability to perceive, memorize, think
abstractly, and so forth.
• Intelligence, according to this view, is not only rational
and purposeful but also worthwhile. A value judgment
is fundamentally involved, as it is in our definition of
almost any abstract concept. This approach extends
the concept of intelligence a great deal, perhaps
beyond the point at which it continues to be useful.
Intelligence and Creativity
• Expertise, a well-developed base of knowledge,
furnishes the ideas, images, and phrases we use as
mental building blocks.
• . Imaginative thinking skills provide the ability to see
things in novel ways, to recognize patterns, and to
make connections. Having mastered a problem’s basic
elements, we redefine or explore it in a new way.
• A venturesome personality seeks new experiences,
tolerates ambiguity and risk, and perseveres in
overcoming obstacles.
• Intrinsic motivation is being driven more by interest,
satisfaction, and challenge than by external pressures.
• A creative environment sparks, supports, and refines
creative ideas.
Emotional Intelligence
• Emotional intelligence is the ability to perceive,
understand, manage, and use emotions. Those
with higher emotional intelligence achieve
greater personal and professional success.
However, critics question whether we stretch the
idea of intelligence too far when we apply it to
emotions.
• The social intelligence have called by John Mayer,
Peter Salovey, and David Caruso as emotional
intelligence.
Spatial intelligence genius
• In 1998, World Checkers
Champion Ron “Suki” King
of Barbados set a new
record by simultaneously
playing 385 players in 3
hours and 44 minutes.
• Thus, while his opponents
often had hours to plot
their game moves, King
could only devote about 35
seconds to each game. Yet
he still managed to win all
385 games!
Emotional intelligence components
• perceive emotions (to recognize them in faces,
music, and stories).
• understand emotions (to predict them and
how they change and blend).
• manage emotions (to know how to express
them in varied situations).
• use emotions to enable adaptive or creative
thinking.
The Origins of Intelligence Testing
• In France in 1904, Alfred Binet started the modern
intelligencetesting movement by developing questions
that helped predict children’s future progress in the
Paris school system. Lewis Terman of Stanford
University revised Binet’s work for use in the United
States. Terman believed his Stanford-Binet could help
guide people toward appropriate opportunities, but
more than Binet, he believed intelligence is inherited.
• During the early part of the twentieth century,
intelligence tests were sometimes used to “document”
scientists’ assumptions about the innate inferiority of
certain ethnic and immigrant groups.
Smart and rich?
• Jay Zagorsky
(2007) tracked
7403 participants
in the U.S.
National
Longitudinal
Survey of Youth
across 25 years.
• As shown in this
scatterplot, their
intelligence
scores correlated
+.30 with their
later income.
Alfred Binet: Predicting School
Achievement
• Binet personally leaned toward an environmental
explanation. To raise the capacities of low-scoring
children, he recommended “mental orthopedics” that
would train them to develop their attention span and
selfdiscipline. He believed his intelligence test did not
measure inborn intelligence as a meter stick measures
height.
• Rather, it had a single practical purpose: to identify
French schoolchildren needing special attention. Binet
hoped his test would be used to improve children’s
education, but he also feared it would be used to label
children and limit their opportunities.
Lewis Terman: The Innate IQ
• From such tests, German psychologist William
Stern derived the famous intelligence quotient, or
IQ. The IQ was simply a person’s mental age
divided by chronological age and multiplied by
100 to get rid of the decimal point:
• IQ = (mental age/chronological age) x100
• Thus, an average child, whose mental and
chronological ages are the same, has an IQ of
100. But an 8-year-old who answers questions as
would a typical 10-year-old has an IQ of 125.
Intelligence testing
• Terman promoted the widespread use of intelligence
testing. His motive was to “take account of the
inequalities of children in original endowment” by
assessing their “vocational fitness.”
• In sympathy with eugenics—a much-criticized
nineteenthcentury movement that proposed
measuring human traits and using the results to
encourage only smart and fit people to reproduce—
Terman envisioned that the use of intelligence tests
would “ultimately result in curtailing the reproduction
of feeble-mindedness and in the elimination of an
enormous amount of crime, pauperism, and industrial
inefficiency”.
Street smarts
• This child selling candy
on the streets of
Manaus, Brazil, is
developing practical
intelligence at a very
young age.
Modern Tests of Mental Abilities
• Psychologists classify such tests as either
achievement tests, intended to reflect what you
have learned, or aptitude tests, intended to
predict your ability to learn a new skill. Exams
covering what you have learned in this course are
achievement tests.
• A college entrance exam, which seeks to predict
your ability to do college work, is an aptitude
test—a “thinly disguised intelligence test,” says
Howard Gardner.
Aptitude tests
• Aptitude tests aim to predict how well a test-taker will
perform in a given situation. So they are necessarily
“biased” in the sense that they are sensitive to
performance differences caused by cultural experience.
But bias can also mean what psychologists commonly
mean by the term—that a test predicts less accurately
for one group than for another. In this sense of the
term, most experts consider the major aptitude tests
unbiased.
• Stereotype threat, a self-confirming concern that one
will be evaluated based on a negative stereotype,
affects performance on all kinds of tests.
Psychologist David Wechsler
• Psychologist David Wechsler created what is now the
most widely used intelligence test, the Wechsler Adult
Intelligence Scale (WAIS), with a version for school-age
children (the Wechsler Intelligence Scale for Children
[WISC]), and another for preschool children. As
illustrated in FIGURE 10.5, the WAIS consists of 11
subtests broken into verbal and performance areas.
• It yields not only an overall intelligence score, as does
the Stanford-Binet, but also separate scores for verbal
comprehension, perceptual organization, working
memory, and processing speed.
Gray matter matters
• A frontal view of the
brain shows some of
the areas where gray
matter is
concentrated in
people with high
intelligence scores,
and where g may
therefore be
concentrated.
Flexibility or versatility of adjustment
• Intelligence is difficult to define, but most
definitions generally refer to some aspect of
flexibility or versatility of adjustment. Its
measurement is often accomplished by
individual intelligence tests: the StanfordBinet, from which the concept of mental age
(MA) and the intelligence quotient (IQ)
developed; and the Wechsler Scales, which
feature a wide variety of subtests with both
verbal and non-verbal items.
Alfred Binet
• “Some recent philosophers
have given their moral
approval to the deplorable
verdict that an individual’s
intelligence is a fixed
quantity, one which cannot
be augmented. We must
protest and act against this
brutal pessimism”
Standardization
• The number of questions you answer correctly on an
intelligence test would tell us almost nothing. To
evaluate your performance, we need a basis for
comparing it with others’ performance. To enable
meaningful comparisons, test-makers first give the test
to a representative sample of people.
• When you later take the test following the same
procedures, your scores can be compared with the
sample’s scores to determine your position relative to
others. This process of defining meaningful scores
relative to a pretested group is called standardization.
Matching patterns
• Block design puzzles
test the ability to
analyze patterns.
• Wechsler’s
individually
administered
intelligence test
comes in forms suited
for adults (WAIS) and
children (WISC).
Intelligence and Personal Factors
• In cross-sectional investigations, different subjects are
studied at different ages. In the longitudinal method,
the same subjects are studied as they grow older.
• Cultural change is an additional influence in both
approaches, and when control procedures are used to
correct for cultural improvements, it is found that
mental growth continues into the fifth decade and
later, providing that the individual is engaged in
stimulating mental activities. The highest levels of
performance for the different mental abilities are
reached at different ages.
Exceptional Intelligence
• Mentally gifted persons comprise the upper 2
percent of the population in mental ability, and
generally they are more physically fit, socially
adept, and traditionally moral than the general
population. Educational programs for the gifted
are less structured and proceed more rapidiy
than those for other children.
• They also stress research skills and originality;
these goals are achieved partly by permitting
such students to work together on a multigrade
basis.
Close cousins: Aptitude and
intelligence scores
• A scatterplot
shows the
close
correlation
between
intelligence
scores and
verbal and
quantitative
SAT scores.
Origins of Intelligence
• The nature-nurture controversy has a long history,
extending through many studies of national and racial
differences. The question of the genetic basis of group
differences is impossible to answer for several reasons,
chiefly the absence of satisfactory tests and the difficulty in
establishing appropriate samples of subjects.
• The most promising research on the origins of intelligence
involves comparison of identical twins reared apart, but
even these investigations afford diverse interpretations.
The influences of heredity and environment are always
present and they depend upon one another. The significant
issue is to understand their interaction in the production of
intelligence.
Males and females average
• Males and females average the same in overall
intelligence. There are, however, some small but
intriguing gender differences in specific abilities. Girls
are better spellers, more verbally fluent, better at
locating objects, better at detecting emotions, and
more sensitive to touch, taste, and color.
• Boys outperform girls at spatial ability and related
mathematics, though girls outperform boys in math
computation. Boys also outnumber girls at the low and
high extremes of mental abilities. Psychologists debate
evolutionary, brain-based, and cultural explanations of
such gender differences.
The normal curve
• Scores on aptitude tests tend to form a normal, or bellshaped, curve around an average score.
• For the Wechsler scale, for example, the average score is
100.