Unit 3 - Chapter 7 of Text

Question 1

7.1 - What are the 3 cluster of abilities that define intelligence?

Answer 1

1) Problem-solving ability
2) Verbal ability
3) Social competence.

Question 2

7.1 - How is problem-solving ability defined?

Answer 2

Behaviors such as:

• Reasoning logically
• Identifying connections among ideas
• Seeing all aspects of a problem
• Making good decisions

Question 3

7.1 - How is verbal ability defined?

Answer 3

• Speaking articulately
• Reading with high comprehension
• Having a good vocabulary

Question 4

7.1 - How is social competence defined?

Answer 4

• Accepting others for what they are
• Admitting mistakes
• Displaying interest in the world at large, and being on time for appointments

Question 5

7.1 - What behaviours are considered to be important indicators of intelligence for people of all ages?

Answer 5

Behaviors such as:

• Motivation
• Intellectual effort
• Reading

Question 6

7.1 - What behaviours are considered specific to particular points in the life span?

Answer 6

• For example, for a 30-year-old planning for the future and being open-minded were listed most often - The intelligent 50- and 70-year-olds were described as acting responsibly, adjusting to life situations, being verbally fluent, and displaying wisdom.

Question 7

7.1 - Why are theories of intelligence considered multi-dimensional?

Answer 7

• They specify many domains of intellectual abilities.

Question 8

7.1 - What are the 3 life-span concepts?

Answer 8

• Life-span concepts include:
• Multi-directionality
• Plasticity
• Inter-individual variability
• Some intellectual decline may be seen with age but that stability and growth in mental functioning also can be seen across adulthood
• Stresses the role of intelligence in human adaptation and daily activity.

Question 9

7.1 - What does multi-directionality refer to?

Answer 9

• The distinct patterns of change in abilities over the life span, with these patterns differing for different abilities

Question 10

7.1 - What does plasticity refer to?

Answer 10

• The range of functioning within an individual and the conditions under which a person’s abilities can be modified within a specific age range
• Implies that what may appear to be declines in some skills may in part represent a lack of practice
• Current studies examining brain plasticity and behavior find that experience alters the brain across the life span
• Older adults who show decline in cognitive functioning can be trained to perform at a higher level.

Question 11

7.1 - What does inter-individual variability refer to?

Answer 11

• Acknowledges that adults differ in the direction of their intellectual development
• Within a given cohort or generation some people show longitudinal decline in specific abilities, whereas some people show stability of functioning in those same abilities. Finally, others show increments in performance in those same abilities

Question 12

7.1 - Using the four concepts of multidimensionality, plasticity, multi-directionality, and inter-individual variability, what is the dual-component model of intellectual functioning?

Answer 12

Dual-component model of intellectual functioning

2 interrelated types of developmental processes:

1) Mechaniccs of Intelligence
2) Pragmatic intelligence

Mechanics of Intelligence - the neurophysiological architecture of the mind

• Cognitive abilities include basic forms of thinking associated with information processing and problem solving such as reasoning, spatial orientation, or perceptual speed.
• Intellectual change in this area is greatest during childhood and adolescence, as we acquire the skills needed for complex cognitive tasks

Pragmatic Intelligence - bodies of knowledge acquired from, and embedded in our cultures

• Includes everyday cognitive performance and human adaptation
• Includes verbal knowledge, wisdom, and practi-
  cal problem solving
• Pragmatic intellectual growth dominates adulthood.

Question 13

7.1 - How do different researchers approach intelligence?

Answer 13

• Some approach from a factor analysis approach … separate pieces that can be added together to form intelligence.
• Others take a holistic view and think of intelligence as a way or mode of thinking.

Question 14

7.1 - What is the psychometric approach to measuring intelligence?

Schaie and Horn

Answer 14

• Concentration on measuring intelligence as per-
  formance on standardized tests
• Assessed by tests specifically designed to assess these skills.
• These tests focus on getting correct answers and tend to give less emphasis on the thought processes used to arrive at them

Question 15

7.1 - What is the information-processing mechanism approach to measuring intelligence?

Salthouse & Craik

Answer 15

• This approach aims at a detailed analysis of aging-associated changes in components of cognitive mechanisms and their interactions

Question 16

7.1 - What is the cognitive-structural approach to measuring intelligence?

Answer 16

• The ways in which people conceptualize and solve problems than with scores on tests.
• Such approaches to intelligence emphasize developmental changes in the modes and styles of thinking.
• These include a search for post-formal operations, the assessment of wisdom, and studies of practical intelligence

Question 17

7.1 - What three clusters of ability did Sternberg identify in his study of people’s everyday conceptualizations of intelligence?

Answer 17

1) Problem-solving ability
2) Verbal ability
3) Social competence.

Question 18

7.1 - What are the four major aspects of intelligence
emphasized by the life-span approach?

Question 19

7.1 - What are the three major approaches for researching intelligence?

Question 20

7.2 - What are primary mental abilities and how do they change across adulthood?

Question 21

7.2 - What are secondary mental abilities?

Question 22

7.2 - What are the developmental trends for fluid and crystallized intelligence?

Question 23

7.2 - What are the primary moderators of intellectual change?

Question 24

7.2 - How successful are attempts at training primary mental abilities?

Question 25

7.2 - What is the structure of intelligence?

Answer 25

• Psychometric approach focuses on the interrelationships among intellectual abilities, the
  major goal is to describe the ways in which these
  relationships are organized
• This organization of interrelated intellectual abilities is termed the structure of intelligence.
• The most common way to describe the structure of intelligence is to picture it as a hierarchy
• Each higher level of this hierarchy represents
  an attempt to organize components of the level
  below in a smaller number of groups.
• The lowest level consists of individual test questions—the specific items that people answer on an intelligence test.
• These items can be organized into tests at
  the second level.
• The third level, primary mental abilities, reflects interrelationships among performances on intelligence tests.

The interrelationships uncovered among the primary mental abilities produce the secondary mental abilities at the fourth level.

• Third-order mental abilities in turn represent interrelationships among the secondary men-
  tal abilities.
• Finally, general intelligence at the top
  refers to the interrelationships among the third-
  order abilities.

Question 26

7.2 - How do researchers construct theoretical hierarchies?

Answer 26

• The structure of intelligence is uncovered through sophisticated statistical detective work using factor analysis. This is the process:
  1) Researchers obtain people’s performances on many types of problems
  2) Results are examined to determine whether performance on one type of problem, such as filling in missing letters in a word, predicts performance on another type of problem, such as unscrambling letters to form a word
  3) If the performance on one test is highly related to the performance on another, the abilities measured by the two tests are interrelated and are called a factor

Question 27

7.2 - What are primary mental abilities?

Answer 27

Seven primary mental abilities:

1) Numerical facility or the basic skills underlying
one’s mathematical reasoning

2) Word fluency, or how easily one can produce verbal descriptions of things
3) Verbal meaning, or one’s vocabulary ability

4) Inductive reasoning, or one’s ability to extrapolate
from particular facts to general concepts

5) Spatial orientation, or one’s ability to reason in the three-dimensional world in which we live

6) Perceptual speed, is one’s ability to rapidly
and accurately find visual details and make
comparisons

7) Verbal memory, refers to the ability to store and
recall meaningful language units. Note that tests for
this ability typically include word fluency

Question 28

7.2 - What kind of a hierarchical relationship in intellectual abilities did Schaie propose?

Answer 28

• Schaie proposes a hierarchical relationship in intellectual abilities.
• Information-processing abilities such as perceptual speed and verbal memory are considered the most basic and are tied to neuropsychological functioning
• Mental abilities such as reasoning and numbering are products of acquired information.
• All mental abilities underlie all meaningful activities of a person’s daily life
• Thus the developmental trends uncovered in the Seattle Longitudinal Study provide important insights into the course of intellectual changes that ultimately affect people’s work and daily living routines.

Question 29

7.2 - At what age do people improve on the primary abilities test?

Answer 29

Schaie (2005) summarizes the findings as follows:

• Analysis of the data collected through the sixth time of measurement shows that people tend to improve on the primary abilities tested until their late 30s or early 40s.
• Scores then tend to stabilize until people reach their mid-50s or early 60s.
• But by their late 60s, people tend to show consistent declines in each testing.
• Although some people begin to show declines in their mid-50s, these decrements tend to be small until the mid-70s.

Question 30

7.2 - Do the general trends observed reflect global
or specific changes in intelligence?

Answer 30

• That is, to what extent do people decline on all the primary abilities tested or only some of them?
• By age 60 nearly everyone shows decline on one ability, very few people show decline on four or five abilities
• Even by age 88, only an extremely small number of people had declined significantly on all five abilities.

Question 31

7.2 - What happens when we consider both pragmatic
types of abilities and mechanic types of abilities related to Baltes’s two-component theory of intelligence?

Answer 31

• Abilities that are typical of mechanics such
  as reasoning, verbal memory, spatial orientation, and perceptual speed typically show a pattern of decline during adulthood, with some acceleration in very old age.
• These abilities show a steady pattern of decline.
• However, more pragmatic abilities, such as verbal
  meaning or ability and numerical ability, tend to
  remain stable or even increase up to the 60s and 70s.
• There are little or no age decrements before the age of 74.
• They start to show decline only in very old age.
• It appears that most of the loss occurs in highly challenging, complex, and stressful situations that require activating cognitive reserves

Question 32

7.2 - What are secondary mental abilities?

Answer 32

• It may be easier to understand intellectual development by looking at interrelationships among them.
• Consideration of the relationships among the primary mental abilities has resulted in the identification of secondary mental abilities, which are broad- ranging skills, each composed of several primary abilities
• At present, at least six secondary abilities have been found.
• Most of the developmental research and discussion of these abilities has been focused on two: fluid intelligence and crystallized intelligence

Question 33

7.2 - What is fluid and crystallized intelligence?

Answer 33

• Crystallized and fluid intelligence include many of the basic abilities that we associate with intelligence, such as verbal comprehension, reasoning, integration, and concept formation
• Interestingly, they are associated with age
  differently, are influenced by different underlying
  variables, and are measured in different ways.
• Fluid intelligence consists of the abilities that
  make you a flexible and adaptive thinker, that allow
  you to draw inferences, and that enable you to understand the relations among concepts independent of acquired knowledge and experience.
• It reflects the abilities you need to understand and respond to any situation, but especially new ones:
• Inductive reasoning
• Integration
• Abstract thinking
• Here is an example of a question that taps fluid abilities: “What letter comes next in
  the series d f i m r x e ——?”

Other typical ways of testing fluid intelligence
include mazes, puzzles, and relations among shapes.

Question 34

7.2 - What is crystalized intelligence (Gc)?

Answer 34

• Large number of performances indicating:
• Breadth of knowledge
• Experience
• Sophistication
• Comprehension of communications
• Judgment
• Understanding of conventions
• Reasonable thinking
• The factor that provides evidence of Gc is defined by primary abilities such as:
• Verbal comprehension
• Concept formation
• Logical reasoning
• General reasoning.
• Tests used to measure the ability include:
• Vocabulary (What is a word near in meaning to temerity?)
• Esoteric analogies (Socrates is to Aristotle as Sophocles is to ?)
• Remote associations (What word is associated with bathtub, prizefighting, and wedding?)
• Judgment (Determine why a foreman is not getting the best results from workers)
• As measured, the factor is a fallible representation of the extent to which a person has incorporated, through the systematic influences of acculturation, the knowledge and sophistication that constitutes the intelligence of a culture.

Question 35

7.2 - What is fluid intelligence (Gf)?

Answer 35

Broad abilities include:

• Seeing relationships between stimulus patterns
• Drawing inferences from relationships
• Comprehending implications

Primary abilities include:

• Induction
• Figural flexibility
• Integrating cooperatively with Gc
• Logical and general reasoning

Tasks that measure the factor include:

• Letter series (What letter comes next in the series d f i m r x e?), matrices
• Discern the relationships between elements of 3-by-3 matrices and topology (From among a set of figures in which circles, squares, and triangles overlap in different ways, select a figure that will enable one to put a dot within a circle and a square but outside a triangle)
• The factor is a fallible representation of such fundamental features of mature human intelligence as reasoning, abstracting, and problem solving.
• In Gf these features are not imparted through the systematic influences of acculturation but instead are obtained through learning that is unique to an individual or is in other ways not organized by the culture

Question 36

7.2 - What is visual organization (Gv)?

Answer 36

Indicated by primary mental abilities such as:

• Visualization
• Spatial orientation
• Speed of closure
• Flexibility of closure

It is measured by tests such as:

• Gestalt closure - Identify a figure in which parts have been
  omitted
• Form board - show how cutout parts fit together to depict a particular figure
• Embedded figures - find a geometric figure within a set of intersecting lines

Question 37

7.2 - What is auditory organization (Ga)?

Answer 37

Tasks that measure Ga include:

• Repeated tones - identify the first occurrence of a tone when it occurs several times
• Tonal series - indicate which tone comes next in an orderly series of tones
• Cafeteria noise - identify a word amid a din of surrounding noise

Like Gv, this ability is best indicated when the relationships among stimuli are not such that one needs to reason for understanding but instead are such that one can fluently perceive patterns among the stimuli

Question 38

7.2 - What is short-term acquisition and retrieval?

Answer 38

• This ability comprises becoming aware and processes of retaining information long enough to do something with it.
• Almost all tasks that involve short-term memory have variance in this factor.
• Span memory, associative memory, and meaningful memory
  are primary abilities that define the factor, but measures
  of primary and secondary memory can also be used to
  indicate the dimension.

Question 39

7.2 - What is long-term storage and retrieval?

Answer 39

• The ability to store and retrieve information that was acquired in the distant past
• This dimension holds the processes for encoding associations for long-term storage and using these associations, or forming new ones, at the time of retrieval.
• These associations are not so much correct as they are possible and useful; to associate teakettle with mother is not to arrive at a truth so much as it is to regard both concepts as sharing common attributes (e.g., warmth).