INTELLIGENCE: MEASURING MENTAL

PERFORMANCE

Factor Affecting Intelligence

• Heredity

• Culture

• Socioeconomic Status

• Characteristics of Home Environment

• Schooling

• Testing Instrument and Reaction to it

What is Intelligence?

• According to Piaget, intelligence is adaptive thinking or action.

• Quantitative vs. Qualitative

• Unidimensional vs. Multidimensional

Psychometric Approach

• A theoretical perspective that portrays intelligence as a train (or set of traits) on which individuals differ; psychometric theorists are responsible for the development of standardized intelligence tests.

Alfred Binet

• Binet and Theodore Simon are often considered pioneers of intelligence testing

• The French government initially commissioned Binet to develop testing procedures to identify students who were slow learners. Once identified, these students would be placed in remedial learning settings.

• These theorists identified a large battery of traits deemed essential for learning and intelligence: Attention, perception, memory, numerical reasoning, verbal comprehension, etc. Items that successfully discriminated normal children from those described by teachers as dull or slow were kept in the final test.

• Binet also testing to distinguish cognitive capabilities between ages 3 and 13. Method led to development of mental age.

Critics of the Unidimensional Approach

• Many theorists believe that it is impossible to reduce intelligence to one evaluative numerical score. Intellectual performance is based on several traits:– Defining words or concepts– Extracting meanings from written passages– Reducing geometric designs with blocks– Solving arithmetic puzzles

• These particular subsets of cognitive abilities cannot be reduced to one particular definition of intelligence.

• Factor Analysis Approach

Charles Spearman

• Noted that when children were subjected to several different cognitive test, there were moderate correlations in their performance. Spearman speculated that there must be a general mental factor that explained the consistent performance (g).

• Spearman also noted that there are certain inconsistencies regarding performance in certain areas. He speculated that there were specialized traits that denoted this occurrence (s).

Louis Thurstone

• Expanded Spearman’s theory.• Analyzed 50 mental tests administered to eight-graders and college

students. As a result, he came up with seven factors called Primary mental abilities which made up Spearman’s g:

• Spatial ability• Perceptual speed (quick processing of visual information)• Numerical reasoning• Verbal meaning• Word fluency (speed at recognizing words)• Memory• Inductive reasoning (forming a rule that describes a set of

observations)

• These theorists believed that there must be a relatively small number of factors that made up intelligence.

J. P. Guilford

• Disagreed with Spearman and Thurstone, Guilford purported that intelligence may be a function of 180 basic mental abilities.

– Guilford initially classified cognitive tasks along the dimensions of Context—What must the person think about

– Operations—What kind of thinking is the person asked to perform

– Products—What kind of answer is required

• Guilford argued that there are 5 kinds of intellectual contents, 6 kinds of mental operations, and 6 kinds of intellectual products. Based on this structure-of-intelligence model, there were 180 primary mental abilities.

• Today, more than 100 of the 180 mental abilities in Guilford’s model have been devised

Raymond Cattell and John Horn

• Proposed Spearmans g and Thurstone’s primary mental abilities can be reduced to two major dimensions of intellect: Fluid and Crystallized

• Fluid intelligence. The ability to perceive relationships and solve relational problems of the type that are not taught and are relatively free of cultural influences.

• Crystallized intelligence. The ability to understand relations or solve problems that depend on knowledge acquired from schooling and other cultural influences

Hierarchial Models of Intelligence

• Model of the structure of intelligence in which a broad, general ability factor is at the top of the hierarchy, with a number of specialized ability factors nested underneath.

Information Processing Viewpoint

• Argue that the psychometric focuses only on what the individual knows (intellectual content) rather that the processes by which this knowledge is acquired, retained, and used to solve problems.

• In addition, traditional intelligence researchers do not measure other attributes we commonly think of as intelligence (common sense, social and interpersonal skills, and talents that underlie creative accomplishments in music, drama, and athletics).

Robert Sternberg’s Triarchic Theory of Intelligence

• Identifies 3 components of Intellectual behavior:

• Contextual Component. Intellectual people are those who can successfully adapt to their environment or can shape that environment to suit them better.

• Experimental Component. Continued exposure to certain challenges increases our awareness and ability to execute in a cognitive manner. Therefore, intelligence is a function of adaptation on truly novel tasks.

• Componential Component. Intellectual people apply analytical skills to size up a particular problem, formulate strategies to solve them, and then monitor our cognitive activities until the goal is accomplished. Like Piaget, the focus is less on right or wrong answers but the process of reasoning.

Howard Gardner

• Argues that there are at least 9 forms of intelligence that are distinct and linked to specific areas of the brain.

• Notes that individuals can be truly exceptional in one area and deficient in another.– Savant Syndrome—mentally retarded people with an

extraordinary talent.– Ex. Leslie Lemke who is blind, mentally retarded, and

had cerebral palsy. Could not talk until adulthood, yet he can hear a musical piece once and recite it flawlessly on the piano.

Stanford-Binet Intelligence Test

• Lewis Terman of Stanford University revised the Binet Intelligence test for use in US.

• Intelligence then became based on Verbal reasoning, quantitative reasoning, spatial reasoning, and short-term memory

• Lewis used a method developed by Stern (1912) known as the IQ method (Mental age/Chronological age X 100). A score of 100 denotes an average IQ.

• WECHSLER SCALES– David Wechsler developed intelligence test because he believed that

Binet’s test were overloaded with verbal reasoning. He believed that Binets tests were biased against children who have language handicaps (English as a second language, reading and hearing difficulties).

Newer Approaches to Intelligence Testing

• Kaufman Assessment Battery for Children was designed to evaluate how well children actually learn new material when an examiner provides them with competent instruction. Learning through novel situations. Kaufman’s method is known as Dynamic Assessment Method.

– Argument for this method. The traditional psychometric approach may be biased against children from culturally diverse or economically disadvantaged backgrounds who lack opportunities to learn what the tests measure.

Stability of IQ tests

• When looking at infants, we find that DQs do not predict later IQ development.

• In fact, IQ done not stabilize until around the age of 4 years when looking at large group samples of children. However, when looking at individual differences, IQ does vary with age and effort.

• Students who have high IQ generally come from families who promote learning, middle-class families, authoritative parenting

• Among poverty-stricken families, there seems to be a decline in intelligence.– Impoverished environments dampen intellectual growth and these

inhibiting effects accumulate over time. The longer children remain in impoverished environments, the worse they perform on IQ tests. This is called Cumulative-deficit hypothesis.