Week 5: Intelligence

Question 1

Define intelligence

Answer 1

the ability to use one’s mind to solve novel problems and learn from experience

Question 2

What did Henry Goddard contribute to the area of intelligence testing?

Answer 2

• Administered intelligence tests to European immigrants arriving in America
• Concluded that the majority of Jews, Hungarians, Italians, and Russians were “feebleminded”
• Also used his tests to identify feebleminded American families, whom he claimed were responsible for the nation’s social problems
• Advocated for their segregation and sterilization (American governments subsequently restricted immigration from south/eastern Europe and passed laws requiring sterilization of “mental defectives”

Question 3

What were intelligence tests originally developed for?

Answer 3

To help underprivileged children succeed in school

Question 4

What did Alfred Binet contribute to the area of intelligence testing?

Answer 4

• Psychologist in France during the end of the 19th century, when public schools were being developed
• Believed that schools should use objective methods to determine the learning capabilities of a child, rather than subjective reports from parents/psychiatrists/teachers
• Children who needed extra help should be placed in special classrooms with peers, not in asylums
• Tests were designed to measure aptitude for learning, independent of the child’s prior educational achievement; averages were used to determine the “mental level” (age) of a child

Question 5

What did William Stern contribute to the area of intelligence testing?

Answer 5

• German psychologist in the early 20th century
• Suggested that a child’s “mental level” could be thought of as a “mental age” and used to determine whether they were developing normally
• Ratio and deviation IQ

Question 6

What is the difference between ratio and deviation IQ? What is the issue with ratio IQ?

Answer 6

ratio IQ: a statistic obtained by dividing a person’s mental age by the person’s physical age and then multiplying the quotient by 100
○ Issue: intelligence increases dramatically in the first decade of life and then levels off, skewing results for adults especially

deviation IQ began to be used: a statistic obtained by dividing a person’s test score by the average test score for people of that age and then multiplying the quotient by 100
○ When we talk about IQ scores today, we are almost always talking about deviation IQ

Question 7

What are the most widely used modern intelligence tests?

Answer 7

Those which have their roots in the test developed by Binet and Simon:
• Stanford-Binet Intelligence Scale (based Binet and Simon’s original version, update by Lewis Terman of Standford University)
• Wechsler Adult Intelligence Scale (WAIS) and Wechsler Intelligence Scale for Children (WISC) (most widely used modern tests; developed by David Wechsler, a WWI US Army psychologist)
• These tests use various tasks to determine intelligence, and none involve the writing of words

Question 8

Which life outcomes can be predicted by performance on intelligence tests?

Answer 8

• Income (intelligent people are more likely to be patient, better at calculating risk, predicting how other people will react, etc.; more likely to get more education)
• Amount of education received (a better predictor than even social class; people with high IQs spend more time in school and perform better while there)
• Health and longevity (less likely to smoke or drink, more likely to exercise and eat well
• Relationships

Question 9

What is the two-factor theory of intelligence? Who is credited with developing it?

Answer 9

a person’s performance on a test is due to a combination of general ability (g) and skills that are specific to the test (s)

Charles Spearman

Question 10

What did Louis Thurstone conclude about the two-factor theory of intelligence?

Answer 10

• There is actually no such thing as general ability

- Instead, there are a few stable and independent mental abilities

Question 11

What are Thurstone’s Primary Mental Abilities?

Answer 11

• Word fluency
• Verbal comprehension
• Numerical ability
• Spatial visualization
• Associative memory
• Perceptual speed
• Reasoning

Question 12

What is confirmatiory factor analysis?

Answer 12

a new mathematical technique of the 1980s which revealed that correlations between scores on different tests are best described by a three-level hierarchy, with a general factor (similar to Spearman’s g)at the top, specific factors (similar to Spearman’s) at the bottom, and group factors (similar to Thurstone’s primary mental abilities) in the middle
• Suggests that people have a very general ability called intelligence, which is made up of a small set of middle-level abilities, which are made up of a large set of specific abilities unique to particular tasks

Question 13

What is the data-based approach, when it comes to middle-level cognitive abilities?

Answer 13

computing the correlations between people’s performances on a large number of tests and then seeing how those correlations cluster
• Some people are really good at the specific tasks of fly swatting and teacup balancing because they have a middle-level ability called physical coordination, but this middle-level ability is unrelated to the other middle-level ability, academic skill, which is why these people are not necessarily good at summing numbers or understanding Shakespeare.
• Examining the pattern of correlations between different tests reveals the nature and number of the middle-level abilities.

Question 14

What are Carroll’s 8 middle-level abilities?

Answer 14

• Memory and learning
• Visual percetion
• Auditory perception
• Retrieval ability
• Cognitive speediness
• Processing speed
• Crystallized intelligence
• Fluid intelligence

Question 15

What is crystallized intelligence?

Answer 15

the ability to apply knowledge that was acquired through experience; generally measured with tests of vocabulary and factual information

Question 16

What is fluid intelligence?

Answer 16

the ability to solve and reason about novel problems; generally measured with tests that present abstract problems in new domains that must be solved under time pressure

Question 17

What is the theory-based approach when it comes to middle-level cognitive abilities? Who is it associated with?

Answer 17

because standard intelligence tests present clearly defined problems that have one right answer, and then supply all the information needed to solve them, they can measure only analytic intelligence; in everyday life, people find themselves in situations in which they must formulate the problem, find the information needed to solve it, and then choose among multiple right answers (these situations require creative and practical intelligence)

Robert Sternberg

Question 18

What additional middle-level cognitive abilities did Sternberg identify?

Answer 18

• Analytic intelligence: the ability to identify and define problems and to find strategies for solving them.
• Creative intelligence: the ability to generate solutions that other people do not
• Practical intelligence: the ability to implement these solutions in everyday settings

Question 19

What is emotional intelligence?

Answer 19

the ability to reason about emotions and to use emotions to enhance reasoning; one of the middle level abilities that the data-based approach missed; emotionally intelligent people…
• Know what kinds of emotions a particular event will trigger
• Can identify, describe, and manage their emotions
• Know how to use their emotions to improve their decisions
• Can identify other people’s emotions from facial expressions and tones of voice
• Show less neural activity when solving emotional problems
• Have better social skills and tend to be happier

Question 20

What is the heritability coefficient (h2) when it comes to intelligence?

Answer 20

a statistic that describes the proportion of the difference between people’s IQ scores that can be explained by differences in their genes
• Roughly 50% to 70% of the difference between people’s intelligence test scores is due to genetic differences

Question 21

What are some common misunderstandings of the heritability coefficient?

Answer 21

• The heritability coefficient is not the same as the correlation coefficient
• “the heritability of intelligence is roughly .5” does not mean half of your own intelligence is due to your genes and the other half to experiences; the heritability coefficient measures differences between people, not how much of a particular person’s intelligence comes from which source

Question 22

What is the difference between shared and non-shared environment?

Answer 22

Shared environment: features of the environment that are experience by all relevant members of a household (ex. nutrition, access to books, etc.)

Nonshared environment: features of the environment that are not experience by all relevant members of a household (ex. friends, teachers, illnesses, etc.)
The closer siblings are in age, the higher the correlation between their IQs; they are more likely to have the same teacher, contract the same illnesses at the same time, etc.

Question 23

What factors can influence heritability coefficients?

Answer 23

• Intelligence is not equally heritable among high- and low-income children in America, but is equally heritable among high- and low-income children in more socioeconomically equitable places like Western Europe and Australia (both high- and low-income citizens have more equal amounts of nutrition and leisure, more equal access to books, etc.); environment plays a role
• The heritability of intelligence is higher among adults than among children; the environments of older people are more similar than the environments of younger people, and when environments don’t differ much across people, then differences in their intelligence scores must be due to the one thing that does differ: their genes.

Question 24

What is the Flynn effect?

Answer 24

the average IQ score today is roughly 30 points higher than a century ago; why?

• Better nutrition, schooling, parenting, etc.
• Less intelligent people not having children
• Industrial and technological revolutions have changed the nature of daily living in such a way that people now spend more time solving the kinds of abstract problems included on intelligence tests

Question 25

What is the best predictor of a person’s intelligence?

Answer 25

Material wealth/SES of the family someone was raised in

Question 26

What impact does education have on intelligence?

Answer 26

Although education does increase intelligence, its effects tend to vanish when education ends; however, it does seem to produce long-lasting increases in other important skills such as reasoning

Question 27

Are generational increases in intelligence greater for fluid or crystalized intelligence?

Answer 27

Generational increases in intelligence are nearly twice as large for fluid intelligence than for crystalized intelligence

Question 28

What are two ways that genes and the environment can interact to influence intelligence?

Answer 28

1. Epigenetics
2. Genes can cause people to be drawn towards or away from particular environments; these genes would not be playing a direct role in promoting intelligence, but an indirect role by “pushing” people into the environments that promote their intelligence and “pulling” them away from environments that don’t

Question 29

What is the average IQ, and in what range do most people’s IQs fall?

Answer 29

The average IQ is 100, and 68% of people have IQs between 85 and 115

Question 30

How do IQs differ between males and females?

Answer 30

Males and females have the same average IQ, but the distribution of males’ IQ scores is wider and more variable than the distribution of females’ IQ scores, which means that there are more males than females at both the very top and the very bottom of the IQ range

Question 31

What distinguishes gifted children from less gifted peers most clearly?

Answer 31

the sheer amount of time they spend engaged in their domain of excellence; suggests that giftedness is simply the capacity for passionate devotion

Question 32

What are two of the most common intellectual disabilities?

Answer 32

Down syndrome and fetal alcohol syndrome

Question 33

What is eugenics?

Answer 33

the idea that the intelligence of humankind can and should be improved by controlled breeding

Question 34

What 3 claims did Terman, the creator of the Stanford-Binet intelligence test, make?

Answer 34

• Intelligence is influenced by genes
• Members of some racial groups score better than others on intelligence tests
• Members of some racial groups score better than others on intelligence tests because of differences in their genes this is not an established fact and is a controversial conjecture

Question 35

Why do some groups outperform others on intelligence tests?

Answer 35

• Early intelligence tests had culturally biased questions

- Even though questions on today’s tests are not culturally biased, testing situations might be (i.e. stereotype threat)

Question 36

What is a stereotype threat when it comes to intelligence tests?

Answer 36

the fear of confirming the negative beliefs that others may hold; may negatively influence intelligence test results, meaning these tests are measuring group difference in performance and not actual intelligence

Question 37

What factors can improve intelligence?

Answer 37

• Money
• Education
• Supplementing the diets of pregnant women and neonates with long-chain polyunsaturated fatty acids
• Enrolling low-SES infants in early educational interventions
• Reading to children in an interactive manner
• Sending children to preschool

Question 38

What are cognitive enhancers? List some examples

Answer 38

drugs that improve the psychological processes that underlie intelligent performance

• Ritalin/Adderall: temporarily improve ability to focus attention, manipulate information in working memory, and flexibly control responses
• Modafinal: improves short-term memory and planning abilities

Question 39

What are Schwartz’s 9 intellectual virtues?

Answer 39

• Love of truth (including listening to the truths of marginalized voices and recognizing the importance of different perspectives)
• Honesty (facing the limits of what one knows and owning up to mistakes)
• Fair-mindedness (in evaluating the arguments of others)
• Humility (facing up to limitations and mistakes)
• Perseverance
• Courage (to stand up for what one believes is true, take risks, pursue intellectual paths that might not pan out)
• Good listening
• Perspective-taking and empathy
• Wisdom (enables us to find the balance between timidity and recklessness, carelessness and obsessiveness, speaking up and listening, trust and skepticism, etc.; navigate ethical/virtue conflicts)

Question 40

What is the difference between an absolute and a relative measure?

Answer 40

An absolute measure is based solely on a person’s performance (ex. getting a 75% on a test)

A relative measure is dependant on both a person’s performance and how it compares to standardized group (ex. scoring in the 75th percentile); this is how IQ tests work

Question 41

What is special about the Kaufman Assessment Battery?

Answer 41

It is the only intelligence test to explicitly include cultural diversity and fairness

Question 42

Does infant intelligence predict intelligence later in life?

Answer 42

No. However, infants who respond to novel stimuli faster tend to do better on later IQ tests

Question 43

How does the stability of IQ scores change as people get older?

Answer 43

The stability of IQ scores increases as people age (i.e. scores fluctuate from test to test as a young child, then become more consistent as children deviate less from their peers)

Question 44

What is test-retest reliability when it comes to intelligence tests?

Answer 44

The degree to which intelligence test scores remain similar

Question 45

What does heritability mean?

Answer 45

The proportion of variance in a trait that can be attributed to genetics; how much of your intelligence is influenced by genetics

Question 46

List, from highest similarity in IQ to lowest, the types of twin pairs usually studied

Answer 46

1. Identical twins raised in the same environment (r = 0.86)
2. Identical twins raised in different environments (r = 0.78)
3. Fraternal twins raised in the same environment (r = 0.6)

Question 47

What are the 5 main factors that influence intelligence?

Answer 47

• Genetics
• Parenting style
• SES
• Nutrition
• Physical location/environment

Question 48

How do early intervention programs impact IQ scores in low-SES children?

Answer 48

-Decrease expected declines in IQ (act as a buffer to risks for lowered IQ, rather than increasing IQ)

Question 49

What makes a good early intervention program, when it comes to intelligence?

Answer 49

1. Developmental timing (begin early, extend into development)
2. Program intensity (higher intensity = more intervention hours, longer duration)
3. Direct intervation (experiences for children > parenting programs)