Week 1 - Perspectives on intelligence Flashcards
What were Galton’s contributions in sense perception research?
- Galton whistle (known as dog whistle today)
- He believed that higher hearing abilities were a sign of intelligence
- Used to discover hearing loss with ageing
What were Galton’s contributions in meteorology?
- He created the first weather maps
- Identified anti-cyclones
What happened in Galton’s anthropometric laboratory?
- Argued ghat selective breeding of British people would keep Great Britain in its position as a world power
- Needed to find a way of measuring talent and intelligence
- Birth of mental testing: tested over 17,000 people on measures like weight, height, visual acuity, sense of smell, reaction, head circumference
How was Galton the pioneer of psychological testing?
- He devised the first questionnaire used in psychology to look for predictors of intelligence
- He devised the first correlational statistical procedures
- He was the first person to study twins
What was the Kallikak family? (A study in the heredity of feeblemindedness, 1912)
- On bad side, 189 were classified; 143 were deemed to be ‘feeble minded’ and only 46 were normal. Family was notorious for the number of defectives and delinquents it had produced
- On good side included lots of doctors, lawyers, educators etc., of 496 descendants, only 3 were found to be somewhat degenerate, but not mentally defective.
What was the Goddard intelligence testing at Ellis island?
- Tested a sample of 165 Russian, Hungarian, Jewish, and Italian immigrants and over 80 percent were classified as ‘morons’ (mental age of 12 or below)
- 555 people were deported on grounds of being ‘feeble minded’
- Over a decade, a few thousand people were sent back to Europe because they Performed ver badly on the Binet-Simon intelligence test
What was Terman’s gifted children study?
Gifted children study:
- 1,528 children, 672 females, began in 1921: longest longitudinal study in history (80 years)
What were the developments of intelligence tests for the US army?
- The US army called upon Yerkes as head of the APA to develop brief standardised group intelligence tests to administer to new recruits as they entered world war 1
- Yerkes set up research team
- Developed the Army Alpha (for literate people) and Army Beta (for illiterate people and immigrants who couldn’t speak english) intelligence tests
- however lots of problems with it, misclassification of a lot of soldiers which wasn’t too useful in the war effort
What is the G factor?
This is the general intelligence that a person had. This means anyone who can perform well on one test should be able to perform well on other tests because of their generalised intelligence
What is the Flynn Effect?
This is the effect where people’s IQ increases over time
What are some potential explanations of the Flynn effect?
- Better nutrition
- More technology
- Longer time spent in education
what are some potential environmental factors explaining why the Flynn Effect is reversing?
- Culture changes which render parts of the intelligence test obsolete
- Increases in air pollution
- Changes to schooling such as exams vs course work, resources allocated to special education. Also the introduction of home schooling instead of schooling has reduced IQ.
What is the Bell curve controversy?
- Stereotyping and racism in intelligence testing rose again in 1994. This new book stated that black African Americans were on average 10-15 points lower in IQ test scores than Caucasian Americans and always will because intelligence, as measured by IQ, is mostly inborn or genetic
- Argued that America was becoming a society of cognitive castes
What is SMART training?
What is the relationship between brain size and intelligence?
There is no clear correlation between absolute or relative brain size and intelligence. Assuming that absolute brain size is decisive for intelligence, then whales or elephants should be more intelligent than humans, and horses more intelligent than chimpanzees, which definitely is not the case
