Chapter 10 - Intelligence Flashcards
Intelligence
• The ability to acquire knowledge, to think and reason
effectively, and to deal adaptively with the environment
Sir Francis Galton
- Quantifying Mental Ability
- Mental ability is inherited
- Influenced by Darwin’s theory of evolution
Alfred Binet
- French psychologist
- Mental tests
- Started the modern intelligence-testing movement
Binet’s Assumptions:
• Concept of mental age
- Mental abilities develop with age
- Rate at which people gain mental competence is characteristic of the person and is constant over time.
Binets assumptions on the age groups involved
Age 3 Age 4 Age 6 Age 9 Age 12
By age 3:
- Point to objects that serve various functions
- Name pictures of objects
- Repeat a list of two words or digits
By Age 4:
- Discriminate visual forms
- Define simple words
- Repeat 10-word sentences
- Count up to four objects
By age 6:
- State the differences between similar items
* Count up to nine blocks
By Age 9:
- Solve verbal problems
- Solve simple arithmetic problems
- Repeat 4 digits in reverse order
By age 12:
- Define words such as muzzle
- Repeat five digits in reverse order
- Solve verbal absurdities such as “Bill’s feet are so big he has to pull his trousers over his head. What is foolish about that?”
Stern’s Intelligence Quotient
- Relative score
- Could be applied to people of different chronological ages
- Ratio of mental age to chronological age
- IQ = MA/CA x 100
Lewis Terman
Revised Binet’s tests:
- Stanford-Binet test
WW1 used:
• Army Alpha (verbal)
• Army Beta (non verbal)
Stanford-Binet & Wechsler Scales
• David Wechsler
- Intelligence is set of verbal and non-verbal skills
- Wechsler Adult Intelligence Scale - WAIS
- Wechsler Intelligence Scale for Children - WISC
- Wechsler Preschool and Primary Scale of Intelligence - WPPSI
Stanford-Binet test summary
- Mostly verbal items
* Single IQ score
Wechsler test summary
- Series of subtests
- Verbal tests
- Performance tests
Psychologists have used two major approaches in the
study of intelligence
- The psychometric approach
2. The cognitive processes approach
The cognitive processes approach
• Studies the specific thought processes that underlie those mental competencies
The psychometric approach
• Attempts to map the structure of intellect and to discover the kinds of mental competencies that underlie test performance
Factor Analysis
- A statistical technique
- Reduces a large number of measures to a smaller number of clusters, or factors,
- Each cluster containing variables that correlate highly with one another but less highly with variables in other clusters
• A factor allows us to infer the underlying
characteristic that presumably accounts for the links among the variables in the cluster.
The g Factor: Intelligence as General Mental Capacity
• Charles Spearman (1923)
• British psychologist
- General intelligence - whatever special abilities might be required to perform that particular task.
- E.g., your performance in a mathematics course would depend mainly on your general intelligence but also on your specific ability to learn mathematics
Thurstone’s primary abilities
- Intelligence performance governed by specific abilities
* Seven ‘primary mental abilities’
Seven primary mental abilities
S—Space
V—Verbal comprehension
W—Word fluency -> (producing verbal sents)
N—Number facility -> (dealing with #s)
P—Perceptual speed -> (rec. visual patterns)
M—Rote memory -> (memorizing)
R—Reasoning -> (dealing w novel probs)
S - space
Reasoning about visual scenes
Crystallized intelligence
• Apply previously learned
knowledge to current problems
Fluid intelligence
• Deal with novel situations
without any previous knowledge
Carroll’s Three-Stratum Model: A Modern Synthesis
• Three levels of cognitive skills
1. General
2. Broad
3. Narrow
• Based on a reanalysis of more than 400 data sets
• The model builds upward from specific skills to a g factor at its apex
• The lengths of the arrows from Stratum III to Stratum II
• Represent the contribution of the g factor to each Stratum II ability
Triarchic Theory of Intelligence
• Three specific components
- Metacomponents
- Performance components
- Knowledge-acquisition components
Triarchic Theory of Intelligence
• Robert Sternberg
- A leading proponent of the cognitive processes approach to intelligence
- His Triarchic theory of intelligence addresses
- The psychological processes involved in intelligent behaviour
- The diverse forms that intelligence can take
Metacomponents
Plan and regulate task behaviour
Performance components
Execute stresses specified by metacomponents
Knowledge-acquisition components
Encode and store information
Broader Conceptions of Intelligence: Beyond Mental Competencies
Gardner’s Multiple Intelligences
• 8 relatively independent intelligences
- Has speculated about a 9th possible intelligence
- Existential intelligence
- A philosophically oriented ability to ponder questions about the meaning of one’s existence, life, and death
Eight Relatively Independent Intelligences and Their Abilities’ to
- Linguistic
- Logical-mathemicatical
- Visiospatial
- Musical
- Bodily-kinaesthetic
- Interpersonal
- Intrapersonal
- Naturalistic
Emotional Intelligence
Involves the abilities to: • Read others’ emotions accurately • To respond to them appropriately • To motivate oneself • To be aware of one’s own emotions • To regulate and control one’s own emotional responses
The Mayer-Salovey-Caruso Emotional Intelligence Test (MSCEIT)
• Includes specific tasks to measure each branch
• Perceiving emotions is measured by people’s accuracy in:
- Judging emotional expressions in facial photographs
- The emotional tones conveyed by different landscapes and designs
Four Branches of Emotion Detection and Control Abilities (MSCEIT)
- Branch 1: perceiving emotions
- Branch 2: using emotions to facilitate thought
- Branch 3: understanding emotions
- branch 4: managing emotions
Adaptive advantage in managing emotions
- Stronger emotional bonds
- Greater success
- Less depression
The measurement of intelligence via index scales
- verbal comprehension index scale
- perceptual reasoning index scale
- working memory index scale
- processing speed index scale
verbal comprehension index scale
Tested in:
- vocabulary
- Information
- similarities
perceptual reasoning index scale
Tested in:
- block design: must form design to match a sample design using red/white dots
- matrix reasoning: complete an incomplete matrix or series
- visual puzzle
working memory index scale
Tested in:
- digit span: read sequence of #s and in reverse order
- arithmetic
processing speed index scale
- symbol search: match symbols
- coding: match symbols with #s
Psychometric Standards for Intelligence Tests
• A method for measuring individual differences related to some psychological concept
Achievement Tests
• Designed to discover how much someone knows
Aptitude Tests
• Measure potential for future learning and performance
Reliability - Psychometric Standards
- Test-retest reliability
- Internal consistency
- Interjudge reliability
Test-retest reliability
• Administer measure to same participants twice and correlate scores
Internal consistency
• All of the items of the test should measure the same thing
Interjudge reliability
• Consistency of measurement when different people score the same test
Validity = accuracy
- Construct
- Content
- Criterion-related
Construct
• Does a test measure what it is supposed to measure?
Content
• Do items measure knowledge or skills that comprise the construct?
• Criterion-related
• How well does test score predict criterion measures?
Standardization
Two meanings:
- Development of norms
2. Controlled procedures
- Controlled procedures
- Control for extraneous factors
* Explicit instructions & procedures
- Development of norms
• Provide basis for interpreting individual score - give it meaning
The Flynn effect: Are We Getting Smarter?
- General IQ scores of population change over time
- Increase in IQ scores
- 28 points in US since 1910
- 28 points in Britain since 1942
Reasons unclear:
• Better nutrition?
• Environment?
• Technological advances?
Assessing Intelligence in Non-Western Cultures
• Two main approaches:
- Use problems not tied to knowledge base of
culture
• Reflect ability to analyze stimulus patterns - Create measures tailored to kinds of knowledge valued in particular culture
Raven Progressive Matrice
Culture-fair Measurement?
• A test that is frequently used to measure fluid intelligence
Brain Size and Intelligence
- Brain is locus of intellectual activities
- Evolution has resulted in increase in brain size
- Particularly in cerebral cortex & frontal lobes • But among humans
- Brain size unrelated to intelligence
- Efficiency may be key
Gender differences in neural efficiency, Males:
greater information processing
• 6.5 times as much grey matter
Gender differences in neural efficiency, Females:
greater connectivity
• 10 times amount of white mater
Heredity, Environment, and Intelligence
• Strong genetic component – no intelligence gene
• Quarter to a third of variability attributed to
shared environmental factors
• Children removed from deprived environment show increase in IQ of 10-12 points
Outcome bias
• Underestimates true intellectual ability
Predictive bias
- Predicts outcome measures for some groups not others
* Tests do appear to have predictive bias
Predictive bias occurs if
the test successfully predicts criterion measures, such as school or job performance, for some groups but not for others
Outcome bias Refers to the
extent that a test underestimates a
person’s true intellectual ability
Sex Differences in Cognitive Abilities
• Females better on tests of:
- Perceptual speed
- Verbal fluency
- Mathematical calculation
- Fine motor coordination
Sex Differences in Cognitive Abilities
• Males better on tests of:
- Spatial tasks
- Throwing, catching objects
- Mathematical reasoning
Intellectually gifted
- At the top end of the intelligence bell curve, IQs of 130 or higher place them in the top 10% of the population
- As we might expect from the theories of multiple intelligences
- Many are enormously talented in one area of mental competence
- But quite average in other domains
Eminence
- Only a small percentage of gifted children attain true eminence in later life
- Eminence seems to be a special variety of giftedness
Three interacting factors for eminence
- Highly developed mental abilities but also
• Specific abilities related to one’s chosen field - Creative problem solving
- Motivation & dedication
The Intellectually Disabled
• 3-5% of population • Mildly disabled can attend school • Problems with reading, writing, memory mathematical computation • Often stereotyped
The DSM-5
• Shifted away from basing these distinctions totally on IQ scores and requires a test of adaptive functioning in addition to IQ
