Chapter 9: Intelligence and Its Measurement Flashcards
We may define intelligence as a multifaceted capacity that manifests itself in different ways across the life span. In general, intelligence includes the abilities to acquire and apply knowledge, reason logically, plan effectively, infer perceptively, make sound judgments and solve problems, grasp and visualize concepts, pay attention, be intuitive, find the right words and thoughts with facility, cope with, adjust to, and make the most of new situations.
Intelligence
Intelligence Defined: Views of Scholars and Test Professionals (5)
1) Edwin G. Boring—what the tests test
2) Francis Galton—heredity, sensory=intelligent
3) Alfred Binet—reason, judge, memory, abstract
4) David Weschler—differential, moral
5) Jean Piaget—cognitive development (4 stages)
_____ who was not a psychometrician, attempted to quell the argument by pronouncing that “intelligence is what the tests test.” Although such a view is not entirely devoid of merit, it is an unsatisfactory, incomplete, and circular definition.
Edwin G. Boring
_____ believed that the most intelligent persons were those equipped with the best sensory abilities. This position was intuitively appealing because, as _____observed, “The only information that reaches us concerning outward events appears to pass through the avenues of our senses; and the more perceptive the senses are of difference, the larger is the field upon which our judgment and intelligence can act”.
Among other accomplishments, Sir _____ is remembered as the first person to publish on the heritability of intelligence, thus framing the contemporary nature–nurture debate
Francis Galton
_____ did not leave us an explicit definition of intelligence. He did, however, write about the components of intelligence. For _____, these components included reasoning, judgment, memory, and abstraction.
Galton had viewed intelligence as a number of distinct processes or abilities that could be assessed only by separate tests. In contrast, _____ argued that when one solves a particular problem, the abilities used cannot be separated because they interact to produce the solution.
Alfred Binet
Intelligence, operationally defined, is the aggregate or global capacity of the individual to act purposefully, to think rationally and to deal effectively with his environment.
It is aggregate or global because it is composed of elements or abilities which, though not entirely independent, are qualitatively differentiable.
Intelligence is not identical with the mere sum of these abilities, however inclusive. The only way we can evaluate it quantitatively is by the measurement of the various aspects of these abilities.
_____ added that there are nonintellective factors that must be taken into account. e “capabilities more of the nature of conative, affective, or personality traits [that] include such traits as drive, persistence, and goal awareness [as well as] an individual’s potential to perceive and respond to social, moral and aesthetic values”.
_____ was of the opinion that the best way to measure this global ability was by measuring aspects of several “qualitatively differentiable” abilities. Wechsler wrote of two such “differentiable” abilities, which he conceived as being primarily verbal- or performance-based in nature.
David Wechsler
_____ research focused on the development of cognition in children: how children think, how they understand themselves and the world around them, and how they reason and solve problems.
As cognitive skills are gained, adaptation (at a symbolic level) increases, and mental trial and error replaces physical trial and error.
Cognitive development is thought to occur neither solely through maturation nor solely through learning. He believed that, as a consequence of interaction with the environment, psychological structures become reorganized.
Jean Piaget
Piaget’s four stages of cognitive development:
he believed that their order was unchangeable
1) Sensorimotor Period 0-2
2) Preoperational Period 2-6
3) Concrete Operations Period 7-12
4) Formal Operations Period 12+
Piaget used the term _____ to refer to an organized action or mental structure that, when applied to the world, leads to knowing or understanding.
schema
Infants are born with several simple _____ (the plural of schema), including sucking and grasping. Learning initially by grasping and by putting almost anything in their mouths, infants use these _____ to understand and appreciate their world
schemata
Piaget hypothesized that learning occurs through two basic mental operations:
1) Assimilation - organizing new info sa existing perceived and throughts
2) Accomodation - changing to fit with new information
The four periods of cognitive development:
Child develops ability to exhibit goal-directed, intentional behavior; develops the capacity to coordinate and integrate input from the five senses; acquires the capacity to recognize the world and its objects as permanent entities (that is, the infant develops “object permanence”).
Sensorimotor Period
The four periods of cognitive development:
Child’s understanding of concepts is based largely on what is seen; the child’s comprehension of a situation, an event, or an object is typically based on a single, usually the most obvious, perceptual aspect of the stimulus; thought is irreversible (child focuses on static states of reality and cannot understand relations between states; for example, child believes the quantities of a set of beads change if the beads are pushed together or spread apart); animistic thinking (attributing human qualities to nonhuman objects and events).
Preoperational Period
The four periods of cognitive development:
Reversibility of thought now appears; conservation of thought (certain attributes of the world remain stable despite some modification in appearance); part-whole problems and serial ordering tasks can now be solved (able to put ideas in rank order); can deal only with relationships and things with which he or she has direct experience; able to look at more than one aspect of a problem and able to clearly differentiate between present and historical time.
Concrete Operations Period
The four periods of cognitive development:
Increased ability to abstract and to deal with ideas independent of his or her own experience; greater capacity to generate hypotheses and test them in a systematic fashion (“if-then” statements, more alternatives); able to think about several variables acting together and their combined effects; can evaluate own thought; applies learning to new problems in a deductive way.
Formal Operations Period
A major thread running through the theories of Binet, Wechsler, and Piaget is focus on interactions. _____ refers to the complex concept by which heredity and environment are presumed to interact and influence the development of one’s intelligence.
Interactionism
As we will see, other theorists have focused on other aspects of intelligence. In _____ theories, the focus is squarely on identifying the ability or groups of abilities deemed to constitute intelligence.
Ex. Factor analysis is a technique that is used to reduce a large number of variables into fewer numbers of factors.
factor-analytic
In _____ theories, the focus is on identifying the specific mental processes that constitute intelligence.
The idea of information processing was adopted by cognitive psychologists as a model of how human thought works. For example, the eye receives visual information and codes information into electric neural activity which is fed back to the brain where it is “stored” and “coded”.
information-processing
Factor-Analytic Theories of Intelligence:
______ is a group of statistical techniques designed to determine the existence of underlying relationships between sets of variables, including test scores. In search of a definition of intelligence, theorists have used factor analysis to study correlations between tests measuring varied abilities presumed to reflect the underlying attribute of intelligence.
Factor analysis
Factor-Analytic Theories of Intelligence:
In _____, the researcher essentially explores what relationships exist. In confirmatory factor analysis, the researcher is typically testing the viability of a proposed model or theory.
exploratory factor analysis
As early as 1904, the British psychologist _____ pioneered new techniques to measure intercorrelations between tests.
He found that measures of intelligence tended to correlate to various degrees with each other.
Charles Spearman
This theory is sometimes referred to as a _____ theory of intelligence, with g representing the portion of the variance that all intelligence tests have in common and the remaining portions of the variance being accounted for either by specific components (s), or by error components (e) of this general factor.
The greater the magnitude of g in a test of intelligence, the better the test was thought to predict overall intelligence.
two-factor
Many multiple-factor models of intelligence have been proposed. Some of these models, such as that developed by _____, have sought to explain mental activities by deemphasizing, if not eliminating, any reference to g.
Guilford
_____ initially conceived of intelligence as being composed of seven “primary abilities”. However, after designing tests to measure these abilities and noting a moderate correlation between the tests, _____ became convinced it was difficult if not impossible to develop an intelligence test that did not tap g.
Thurstone
_____ developed a theory of multiple (seven, actually) intelligences: logical-mathematical, bodily-kinesthetic, linguistic, musical, spatial, interpersonal, and intrapersonal
Gardner
As originally conceived by Raymond Cattell, the theory postulated the existence of two major types of cognitive abilities:
crystallized intelligence and fluid intelligence
