College of Education

School of Continuing and Distance Education 2014/2015 – 2016/2017

Lecturer: Dr. Joana Salifu Yendork, Department of Psychology

Contact Information: jyendork@ug.edu.gh

Session Overview

• Although ageing negatively affect many cognitive functions, aspect of intelligence is rather positively affected. In this session, how intelligence is affected by ageing will be focused on. Also significant in this session is the component of intelligence, how intelligence is view in the life span perspective and approaches to studying intelligence.

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Session Outline

The key topics to be covered in the session are as follows:

• The concept of intelligence

• Approaches to studying intelligence and ageing

• Qualitative differences in adult thinking: Piaget’s theory

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Reading List

• Read Chapter 8 of Recommended Text – Adult development and aging, Cavanaugh & Blanchard-Fields (2006).

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THE CONCEPT OF INTELLIGENCE Topic One

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What does intelligence mean? • Study by Sternberg et al. (1981) found that to experts and lay persons,

intelligence consist of three major clusters of related abilities • Problem solving ability: consists of behaviours including logical reasoning,

identifying connections among ideas, seeing all aspects of a problem and making good decisions

• Verbal ability: includes speaking articulately, reading with high comprehension, having a good vocabulary

• Social competence: includes accepting others for what they are, admitting mistakes, displaying interest in the world at large, being on time for appointments.

• For age differences: – Motivation, intellectual effort and reading were perceived as intelligence indicators

for people of all ages – Planning and open-mindedness were perceived as intelligence indicators for young

adults – Acting responsibly, adjusting to life situation, being verbally fluent and displaying

wisdom were perceived as intelligence indicators for older adults

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Life-span view on intelligence

• Multidimensionality: intelligence consist of many different intellectual abilities or types of skills

• Multidirectionality: the distinct patterns of change in abilities over the life span differ for different abilities.

• Plasticity: what may appear to be declines in some skills may in part represent a lack of practice in using them.

• Individual variability: adults differ in the direction of their intellectual development. – Within a given cohort some people show decline in specific

abilities, whereas others show stability, and even increments, in those same abilities.

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Dual-component model of intellectual functioning

• Baltes et al. used the four concepts of multidimensionality, plasticity, multidirectionality and interindividual variability to propose the dual-component model of intellectual functioning

• The model postulates two interrelated developmental processes (Baltes et al. 1999):

• Mechanics of intelligence: concerns the neurophysiological architecture of the mind. – Includes abilities associated with information processing and problem solving

(e.g., reasoning, spatial orientation, perceptual speed). – Intellectual changes here is greatest in childhood and adolescent – These are governed by biological forces and declines with age.

• Pragmatic intelligence: concerns acquired bodies of knowledge available from and embedded within culture. – Includes verbal knowledge, wisdom, practical problem solving. These are

governed by environmental and cultural factors; increases with age.

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Dual-component model of intellectual functioning

• Basic information processing

-content-poor

-universal, biological

-strong genetic determination

• Knowledge: Factual and procedural

-content-rich

-culture-dependent

-experienced-based

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Pragmatics

APPROACHES TO STUDYING INTELLIGENCE AND AGEING

Topic Two

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Approaches to studying intelligence

• The psychometric approach – Focuses on measuring intelligence as performance on

standardized tests.

– These tests focus on getting correct answers and tend to give less emphasis on the thought process used to arrive at them.

• The cognitive-structural approach – Concerned with the ways in which people conceptualize and

solve problems rather than in test scores.

– Emphasizes developmental changes on modes and style of thinking

– Include search for postformal operations, assessment of wisdom and studies of practical intelligence

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Psychometric approach: The measurement of Intelligence

• A measure of psychometric intelligence focus on individuals’ performances on various tests of intellectual abilities and on how these performances are interrelated.

• Organisation of interrelated intellectual abilities is termed structure of intelligence commonly described as a hierarchy .

• Each higher levels represent an organized components of the level below in a smaller number of groups

• The lowest level consists of individual test questions-items answered on intelligence tests and these are organised into tests at the second level

• The third level known as the primary mental abilities reflects interrelationships among performances on intelligence tests.

• Interrelations among performance on primary mental abilities results in secondary mental abilities at the fourth level

• Interrelationships among the secondary mental abilities represents the third-order mental abilities

• A factor is the abilities measured by two interrelated mental abilities • Theorists believe intelligence consists of many factors, types are the primary and

secondary mental abilities

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Primary mental abilities

• Currently there are 25 primary abilities but only seven are typically measured

– Numerical facility: skills underlying mathematical reasoning

– Word fluency: how easily one can produce verbal descriptions of things

– Verbal meaning: vocabulary ability

– Spatial orientation: ability to reason in the three-dimensional world

– Inductive reasoning: ability to extrapolate form particular facts to general concepts

– Perceptual speed: ability to rapidly and accurately find visual details and make comparisons

– Verbal memory: ability to store and recall meaningful language units

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Age-related changes in primary abilities

• Data from K. Warner Schaie’s Seattle Longitudinal study of more than 5,000 individuals from 1956 to 1998 in six testing cycles: – People tend to improve on primary abilities until late 30s or late 40s. – Scores stabilize until mid-50s and early 60s. – By late 60s consistent declines are seen. – Nearly everyone shows a decline in one ability, but few show decline on four

or five abilities – Abilities typical of mechanics (reasoning, spatial orientation, and perceptual

speed) show a pattern of decline during adulthood, with some acceleration in old age.

– Abilities typical of pragmatics (very meaning, numerical ability) tend to remain stable or even increase up to the 60s and 70s, with little or no decline before age 74.

– Those who were better educated and engaged in physical and mental activities throughout older adulthood showed the smallest declines in mental abilities.

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Age-related changes in primary abilities

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Secondary mental abilities

• These reflect interrelationships among primary mental abilities; broad-ranging skills, each composed of several primary abilities

• At least 6 secondary abilities have been found – Crystallized intelligence

– Fluid intelligence

– Visual organization

– Auditory organization

– Short-term acquisition and retrieval

– Long-term storage and retrieval

• Most research focus on fluid and crystallized intelligence

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Secondary mental abilities

• Fluid intelligence – Consists of the abilities that make

an individual a flexible and adaptive thinker, allow to draw inferences

– Enable the person to understand the relations between concepts independent of acquired knowledge and experience.

– It reflects the ability to understand and respond to new situations- inductive reasoning, integration, abstract thinking

– Puzzles, maze and relations among shapes are used to test fluid intelligence

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Secondary mental abilities

• Crystallized intelligence – Knowledge acquired through

life experience and education in a particular culture

– This is the part of intellectual ability that is culturally-determined, such as through schooling or other life experiences.

– Examples: ability to remember historical facts, definition of words, knowledge of literature

– Based on individual’s underlying fluid intelligence

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Age-related changes in fluid and crystallized intelligence

• Fluid and crystallized intelligence follow two different patterns:

– Fluid intelligence declines significantly throughout adulthood

• May be related to changes in the brain (disease, injury, lack of practice)

– Crystallized intelligence improves

• May be because people continue adding new knowledge daily.

– These trends imply that:

• Learning may be difficult as one gets older

• Intellectual development varies from one set of skills to another

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Age-related changes in fluid and crystallized intelligence

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Cohort differences in age-related changes in intellectual performance

• Part of the decline in intellectual performance is due to generational differences rather than age differences (Schaie, 1996, 2005).

– More recent cohorts score better than earlier cohorts on verbal meaning, spatial orientation, and inductive reasoning. May be a result of:

• Better educational opportunities

• Better life styles

• Better nutrition

• Better health care

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Personality and actual performance on intelligence

• Schaie and colleagues compared people’s perceptions to actual test performance and grouped participants into:

– realists (people who accurately estimated changes in performance),

– optimists (people who overestimated positive change), and

– Pessimists (people who overestimate negative change).

• Most people are realists, women are more pessimists on spatial abilities, older people are more pessimists on verbal meaning and inductive reasoning than younger people

– Those with flexible attitudes at midlife experience less decline in intellectual competence than those who are more rigid in middle age

– Motor-cognitive flexibility in one’s 60s is highly predictive of numerical and verbal abilities in late life

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COGNITIVE STRUCTURAL APPROACHES TO STUDYING INTELLIGENCE

Topic Three

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Qualitative differences in adult thinking: Piaget’s theory

• According to Piaget, we create the ways in which knowledge is organised and how we think. Intelligence stem from emergence of increasingly complex structure

• Formal operations is the final and highest stage of cognitive development. • The characteristics of formal thinking are the: (1) ability to think abstractly;

(2) ability to think in a hypothetical-deductive fashion (“if-then” thinking); (3) capacity to think about one’s thinking (to take one’s thought as an object of thought, or to think about others’ thinking; sometimes referred to as metacognition); (4) thinking is unconstrained by reality

• Problem is that not all individuals attain formal operations; only 60-75% of American adolescents can solve formal operational problems, and not more than 30% of adults can complete transition to the highest level of formal operational thought

• This limitation urged researchers to look beyond formal operations in determining pathways of adult cognitive development

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Beyond formal operations – Post-formal thought

• John is known to be a heavy drinker, especially when he goes to parties. Mary, John’s wife, warns him that if he gets drunk one more time, she will leave him and take the children. Tonight John is out late at an office party. John comes home drunk. Does Mary leave John? How certain are you of your answer?

• It’s a good chance that she would leave him because she warns him that she will leave him and take the children, but warning isn’t an absolute thing. . . .And, I’d be absolutely sure that, well let’s see . . . . I’m trying to go all the way. I’m trying to think of putting everything[together] so I can be absolutely certain of an answer. . . . It’s hard to be absolutely certain. “If he gets drunk, then she’ll leave and take the children.” I want to say yes ‘cause everything’s in that favour, in that direction, but I don’t know how I can conclude that she does leave John.

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Beyond formal operations – Post-formal thought

• When adults were given the same problem, they handled it differently, for the most part. Their responses showed a combination of logic, emotion, and tolerance for ambiguity:

– There was no right or wrong answer. You could get logically to both answers [yes or no]. . . . It depends on the steps they take to their answer. If they base it on what they feel, what they know, and they have certain steps to get an answer, it can be logical. (p. 41)

• Using strict criteria for formal operations, rather than viewing adults thinking point as decline in formal operation, they are rather viewed as indicative of another, qualitatively different styles of thinking

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Post-formal thought

• Post-formal thought is characterized by a recognition that truth (the correct answer) varies from situation to situation, that solutions must be realistic to be reasonable, that ambiguity and contradiction are the rule rather than the exception, and that emotion and subjective factors usually play a role in thinking.

• Post-formal thinking skills – Neo-Piagetian theorists believe there is a qualitatively distinct stage of

development after formal operations in which thinking is characterized in the following ways:

– Thinking is relativistic: acceptance of conflicting views; able to explore multiple, sometimes competing perspectives; embrace ambiguity.

– Thinking is interpersonal and feeling-oriented: feelings, intuitions, and personal experiences become the basis for decision-making.

– Thinking is oriented towards problem-finding rather than problem-solving: post-formal thinkers ask new questions, explore new perspectives, new ways of looking at the world.

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Reflective judgement

• Involves how people reason through dilemmas involving current affairs, religion, science, etc. King and Kitchener (1994) proposed that reflective judgement entails three developmental periods (covering 7 stages):

– Pre-reflective judgement (stages 1-3): Belief that "knowledge is gained through the word of an authority figure or through first hand observation, rather than, for example, through the evaluation of evidence.

– [People who hold these assumptions] believe that what they know is absolutely correct, and that they know with complete certainty.

– People who hold these assumptions treat all problems as though they were well-structured" (King & Kitchener, 2002, p. 39).

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Reflective judgement

• Quasi-Reflective Reasoning (Stages 4 and 5): Recognition "that knowledge-or more accurately, knowledge claims-contain elements of uncertainty, which [people who hold these assumptions] attribute to missing information or to methods of obtaining the evidence.

• Although they use evidence, they do not understand how evidence entails a conclusion (especially in light of the acknowledged uncertainty), and thus tend to view judgments as highly idiosyncratic" (King and Kitchener, 2002, p. 40).

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Reflective judgement • Reflective Reasoning (Stages 6 and 7): People who hold

these assumptions accept "that knowledge claims cannot be made with certainty, but [they] are not immobilized by it;

• rather, [they] make judgments that are "most reasonable" and about which they are "relatively certain," based on their evaluation of available data.

• They believe they must actively construct their decisions, and that knowledge claims must be evaluated in relationship to the context in which they were generated to determine their validity.

• They also readily admit their willingness to re-evaluate the adequacy of their judgments as new data or new methodologies become available" (King & Kitchener, 2002, p. 40).

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Absolutist, relativistic and dialectical thinking

• Besides the growth in reflective thinking in postformal thought, Kramer et al. (1992) have also identified three distinct styles of thinking

• Absolutist: involves firmly believing that there is only one correct solution to problems and that personal experience provides truth – Common in adolescents and young adults

• Relativistic: involves realizing that there are many sides to any issue and that the right answer depends on the circumstances – Common in young and middle-aged adults

• Dialectical: see the merits in the different viewpoints but can synthesize them into a workable solution

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Everyday reasoning and problem solving: Expertise

• While young adults outperform older adults on basic information-processing tasks, older adults perform well old jobs that require complex decision making, abstract reasoning and memory for a lot of information.

• Expertise: built-up knowledge about alternative ways to solve problems or make decisions acquired through years of experience and practice

– enables older adults to bypass steps needed by younger adults

– helps older adults to compensate for poorer performance/underlying decline by relying more on their experience

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Everyday reasoning and problem solving: Wisdom

• Baltes and Smith (1009) conceptualised wisdom as an expert system dealing with the meaning and conduct of life – Wisdom consists of knowledge and judgment about the human

condition and ways to plan, manage, and understand a good life

– Criteria for assessing wisdom: • (1) factual knowledge,

• (2) procedural knowledge: strategies for solving life’s problems

• (3) lifespan contextualism (knowledge of life’s settings and social situations and how they change overtime),

• (4) relativism of values (being aware of cultural difference and considerate and sensitive to different values)

• (5) awareness and management of uncertainty (recognising the limits of knowledge and understanding the uncertainty of the future)

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Everyday reasoning and problem solving: Wisdom

• Sternberg (2004) defines it as the application of tacit knowledge and values toward the achievement of the common good

• Wisdom is not the same thing as creativity; wisdom is the growth of expertise and insight, whereas creativity is the generation of a new solution to a problem (Simonton, 1990)

• Wisdom is conceptualised differently by different cultures:

– Westerners tend to define it using cognitive dimensions (e.g., experienced and knowledgeable)

– Eastern cultures tend to define wisdom by stressing affective dimensions (e.g., emotional empathy, emotional regulation)

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Wisdom and aging

• No association has been found between wisdom and ageing – Wisdom is found in adults of all ages

– Rather extensive life experience with the type of problem given, not just life experience in general determine wisdom

• Factors that enhance wisdom (Baltes & Staudinger, 200): – (1) general personal characteristics, e.g., mental ability-cognitive

styles and creativity

– (2) specific expertise conditions, such as mentoring or practice; and

– (3) facilitative life contexts, such as education or leadership experience

– (4) Integration of affect and cognition (Labouvie-Vief, 1990)

– These criteria takes time to develop, hence older adults due to their age get the time which gives the supportive context for wisdom

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Sample Questions

• How is intelligence defined in everyday life?

• What are the major components of the life-span approach?

• What are the three major approaches for researching intelligence?

• What are the two main ways that intelligence has been studied? Define each.

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References

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