History of Intelligence

Focus: How did Galton and Binet differ in their approaches to measuring mental abilities.

Historically, two scientists played seminal roles in the study and measurement of mental skills:
Francis Galton and Alfred Binet
 Galton’s research convinced him that important people had “inherited mental
constitutions” that made them more fit for thinking than their less successful
counterparts.
 Exhibiting his own belief bias, Galton dismissed the fact that the more successful people
he studied almost invariably came from privileged environments. For example: Students
studying in IIT, IIM’S are those who can pay for coaching classes.
 Galton then attempted to demonstrate a biological basis for intelligence by showing that
people who were more socially and occupationally successful would also perform better
on a variety of laboratory tasks by measuring the “efficiency of the nervous system.”
 He developed measures of reaction speed, hand strength, and sensory acuity. He even
measured the size of people’s skulls, believing that skull size reflected brain volume and
hence intelligence.
 Galton’s approach to mental-skills measurement fell into disfavor because his measures
of nervous-system efficiency proved unrelated to socially relevant measures of mental
ability, such as academic and occupational success.

Binet’s Mental Test

 The modern intelligence-testing movement began at the turn of the 20th century, when
the French psychologist Alfred Binet was commissioned by France’s Ministry of Public
Education to develop the test to understand educational ability of children.
 Binet noticed that certain children seemed unable to benefit from normal public
schooling.
 Educators wanted an objective way to identify these children as early as possible so that
some form of special education could be arranged for them.
 In developing his tests, Binet made two assumptions about intelligence: First, mental
abilities develop with age. Second, the rate at which people gain mental competence is
fairly constant over time. In other words, a child who is less competent than expected at
age 5 should also be lagging at age 10.
 To develop a measure of mental skills, Binet asked experienced teachers what sorts of
problems children could solve at ages 3, 4, 5, and so on, up through the school years. He
then used their answers to develop a standardized interview in which an adult examiner
posed a series of questions to a child to determine whether the child was performing at
the correct mental level for his or her age. The result of the testing was a score called the
mental age. For instance, if an 8-year-old child could solve problems at the level of the
average 10-year-old, the child would be said to have a mental age of 10.
 For the French school system, the practical implication was that educational attainment
could be enhanced if placement in school were based at least in part on the child’s mental
age. An 8-year-old child with a mental age of 6 could hardly be expected to cope with the
academic demands of a normal classroom for 8-year-old
Stern’s intelligence quotient
How is IQ now defined?

 The concept of mental age was subsequently expanded by the German psychologist
William Stern to provide a relative score—a common yardstick of intellectual attainment
—for people of different chronological ages. Stern’s intelligence quotient (IQ) was the
ratio of mental age to chronological age, multiplied by 100:

Formula for IQ (mental age/chronological age) X 100.

Thus, a child who was performing at exactly his or her age level would have an IQ of
100. In our previous example, the child with a mental age of 10 and a chronological age
of 8 would have an IQ of (10/8) X 100 = 125.
 A 16-year-old with a mental age of 20 would also have an IQ of 125, so the two would be
comparable in intelligence even though their ages differed.

 Today’s intelligence tests provide an “IQ” score that is not a quotient at all. Instead, it is
based on a person’s performance relative to the scores of other people the same age, with
a score of 100 corresponding to the average performance of that age group.

Intelligence Test History

 Usage in Army: During World War I, this test became the prototype for the Army, a
verbally oriented test that was used to screen large numbers of U.S. Army recruits for
intellectual fitness.
 Because some recruits were unable to read, a nonverbal instrument using mazes, picture
completion problems, and digit-symbol tasks was also developed and given the name
Army Beta. Before the war’s end, more than 1.7 million men had been screened for
intelligence using these tests.
 Inspired by the success of the Army Alpha and Beta for measuring the intelligence of
large numbers of people in a group setting, educators clamored for similar instruments to
test groups of children. New group tests of intelligence, such as the Lorge-Thorndike
Intelligence Test and the Otis- Lennon School Ability Test, soon appeared and became an
important part of educational reform and policy.

Weschler
What was Wechsler’s concept of intelligence? How do the Wechsler scales reflect this concept?

 Two decades after, Psychologist David Wechsler developed a major competitor to the
Stanford-Binet. Wechsler believed that the Stanford- Binet relied too much on verbal
skills. He thought that intelligence should be measured as a group of distinct but related
verbal and nonverbal abilities. He therefore developed intelligence tests for adults and for
children that measured both verbal and nonverbal intellectual skills.
 In 1939 the Wechsler Adult Intelligence Scale (WAIS) appeared, followed by the
Wechsler Intelligence Scale for Children (WISC) in 1955 and the Wechsler Preschool
and Primary Scale of Intelligence (WPPSI) in 1967. Today, the Wechsler tests (WAIS-
III and WISC-IV) are the most popular individually administered
  Example of test in Weschler :

http://brainscale.net/memory-span/training

Definition of intelligence :
What is our working definition of intelligence?
 Important to remember being smart is typically thought of as having good mental skills
that are instrumental to succeeding in school and in higher-level jobs and occupations. As
we shall see, people with good mental skills do indeed do better in school and on the job
in our culture. But if we view intelligence in broader perspective: as the ability to respond
adaptively to the demands of a particular environment. It’s important to remember, then,
that intelligence is not something that has concrete existence; it is, instead, a socially
constructed concept. For example: Street children are good at selling and in mathematics
despite not having a formal education. Street vendors are good at managing their business
despite having a formal business degree.

Definition of Intelligence is the ability to acquire knowledge, to think and reason effectively, and
to deal adaptively with the environment.
The nature of intelligence
Intelligence is hard to define
Psychologists have used two major approaches in the study of intelligence:
 The psychometric approach attempts to map the structure of intellect and to discover the
kinds of mental competencies that underlie test performance.
 The cognitive processes approach studies the specific thought processes that underlie
those mental competencies.

Psychometric

Psychometrics is the statistical study of psychological tests. The psychometric approach to

intelligence tries to identify and measure the abilities that underlie individual differences in
performance.

Factor Analysis:
How is factor analysis used in the study of intelligence?

 Is intelligence a single characteristic or is it a collection of specific, distinguishable

abilities? Some theorist believes that there is a single ability-intelligence-underlying the
various intelligent behavior that people show on the surface. Others believe that
intelligence consist of two or three mental abilities. Other believe that every intellectual
task involves a totally different ability.
 In making such decision about the intelligence, researched have used a statistical
technique called Factor Analysis. The goal of factor analysis is to identify the basic
psychological dimension of the concept being investigated.
 The technique helps in identifying groups of abilities or behavior, or traits, that are
related to one another. In the area of intelligence, the technique is used for several
specific subtests, each designed to measure on specific ability. Researchers administer
diverse measures of mental abilities and then correlate them with one another. They
reason that if certain tests are correlated highly with one another—if they “cluster”
mathematically—then performance on these tests probably reflects the same underlying
mental skill. Further, if the tests within a cluster correlate highly with one another but
much less with tests in other clusters, then these various test clusters probably reflect
different mental abilities.
 For Example: Suppose that test 1 is a measure of vocabulary, test 2 measures reading
comprehension, and test 3 requires respondents to complete sentences with missing
words. Because all three tasks involve the use of words, we might decide to call the
underlying factor “verbal ability.” Inspection of tests 4, 5, and 6 might reveal that all of
them involve the use of numbers or mathematical word problems. We might therefore
decide to name this factor “mathematical reasoning.” What matters is that we have now
reduced six variables to two variables, based on the correlations among them, and we
have arrived at some idea of what the underlying abilities might be. We should note,
however, that the two clusters of tests we’ve identified are not totally unrelated to one
another. The verbal and mathematical scores are also correlated with one another, though
at a much lower level than within the clusters. This fact suggests that although the verbal
 and mathematical factors are clearly distinct from one another, they also share something
in common, perhaps some more general mental ability that cuts across both verbal and
mathematical abilities.

G-Factor Theory :
What kinds of evidence supported the existence of Spearman’s g factor?
 The psychometric argument for intelligence as a general ability was first advanced by the
British psychologist Charles Spearman (1923). He observed that school grades in
different subjects such as English and mathematics, were almost always positively
correlated but not perfectly
 That number of different cognitive and intellectual task measures tend to be correlated
with one another that is people who score high on one tend to score high on the others as
well.
 Spearman concluded that intellectual performance is determined partly by a g factor, or
general intelligence, and partly by whatever special abilities might be required to perform
that particular task.
 Spearman contended that because the general factor—the g factor—cuts across virtually
all tasks, it constitutes the core of intelligence. Thus, Spearman would argue that your
performance in a mathematics course would depend mainly on your general intelligence
but also on your specific ability to learn mathematics.
 Today, many theorists continue to believe that the g factor is the core of what we call
intelligence.
 Moreover, g matters a great deal as a predictor of both academic and job performance.
Spearmen had the notion that intelligence can be largely summed up with one score.

Multi-Factor Theories of intelligence:

Focus question: What led Thurstone to view intelligence as specific mental abilities?

In contrast to Spearmen, several theorist have concluded that intelligence has multiple
components.
 Spearman’s conclusion about the centrality of the g factor was soon challenged by L. L.
Thurstone therefore concluded that human mental performance depends not on a general
factor but rather on seven distinct abilities, which he called primary mental abilities
 They included verbal comprehension, word fluency, perceptual speed memory, numerical
ability, spatial ability, and reasoning. Thurstone assembled a battery of test to measure
these abilities.
 A multifactor theory more complex than Thurstone was proposed by Guildford. This
three dimensional theory suggest that there are 120 factors of intelligence that can be
divided into three dimension

Operations dimension
SI includes six operations or general intellectual processes:

 Cognition—The ability to understand, comprehend, discover, and become aware of information.

 Memory recording—The ability to encode information.
 Memory retention—The ability to recall information.
 Divergent production—The ability to generate multiple solutions to a problem; creativity.
 Convergent production—The ability to deduce a single solution to a problem; rule-following or
problem-solving.
 Evaluation—The ability to judge whether or not information is accurate, consistent, or valid.
 

Content dimension
SI includes five broad areas of information to which the human intellect applies the six
operations:

 Visual—Information perceived through seeing.

 Auditory—Information perceived through hearing.
 Kinesthetic—Information perceived through one’s own physical actions.
 Symbolic—Information perceived as symbols or signs that have no meaning by themselves; e.g.,
Arabic numerals or the letters of an alphabet.
 Semantic – Which is concerned with verbal meaning and ideas.
 Behavioral—Information perceived as acts of people.
 

Product dimension
As the name suggests, this dimension contains results of applying particular operations to
specific contents. The SI model includes six products, in increasing complexity:

 Units—Single items of knowledge.

 Classes—Sets of units sharing common attributes.
 Relations—Units linked as opposites or in associations, sequences, or analogies.
 Systems—Multiple relations interrelated to comprise structures or networks.
 Transformations—Changes, perspectives, conversions, or mutations to knowledge.
 Implications—Predictions, inferences, consequences, or anticipations of knowledge.

Guildford also suggested that intelligence involves divergent thinking that is being creative or
original in problem solving rather than convergent thinking that is trying to solve only one
correct answer for a problem. For example: in exam we have to give one correct answer.

Hierarchical theory:
 Focus question: Differentiate between crystallized and fluid intelligence and indicate
their relation to aging and types of memory.

Raymond Cattell (1971) and John Horn (1985) proposed a new model of intelligence
 Crystallized intelligence is the ability to apply previously acquired knowledge to current
problems. Vocabulary and information tests are good measures of crystallized
intelligence.
 Crystallized intelligence, which is the basis for expertise, depends on the ability
to retrieve previously learned information and problem-solving schemas from long-term
memory. It is dependent on previous learning and practice.
  Cattell and Horn’s second general factor is fluid intelligence, defined as the ability to
deal with novel problem-solving situations for which personal experience does not
provide a solution. It involves creative problem solving skills.
 Fluid intelligence is dependent primarily on the efficient functioning of the central
nervous system rather than on prior experience and cultural context.
 Fluid intelligence requires the abilities to reason abstractly, think logically, and manage
information in working (short-term) memory so that new problems can be solved.
 Thus, long-term memory contributes strongly to crystallized intelligence, whereas fluid
intelligence is particularly dependent on efficient working memory.
 Cattell and Horn concluded that over our life span, we progress from using fluid
intelligence to depending more on crystallized intelligence. Early in life, we encounter
many problems for the first time, so we need fluid intelligence to figure out solutions
makes us more knowledgeable, we have less need to approach each situation as a new
problem. Instead, we simply call up appropriate information and schemas from long-term
memory, thereby utilizing our crystallized intelligence. This is the essence of wisdom.
 Because long-term memory remains strong even as we age, performance on tests of
crystallized intelligence improves during adulthood and remains stable well into late
adulthood. In contrast, performance on tests of fluid intelligence begins to decline as
people enter late adulthood.
 The fact that aging affects the two forms of intelligence differently is additional evidence
that they represent different classes of mental abilities.

Cognitive Process Approaches

Focus of this section: Differentiate between psychometric and cognitive process approaches to
intelligence.

Cognitive Process approach: Psychometric theories of intelligence are statistically

sophisticated ways of providing a map of the mind and describing how people differ from
one another. What psychometric theories don’t explain is why people vary in these mental skills.
Cognitive process theories explore the specific information-processing and cognitive processes
that underlie intellectual ability

Sternberg Theory of Intelligence

Focus: What three classes of psychological processes and forms of intelligence are found in
Sternberg’s triarchic theory?

 Robert Sternberg is a leading proponent of the cognitive processes approach to

intelligence. His triarchic theory of intelligence addresses both the psychological
processes involved in intelligent behavior and the diverse forms that intelligence can
take. His theory break intelligence down into various basic skills that people employ to
take in information, process it, and then use it to reason and solve problems.
 These basic skills can be as simple as ability to distinguish between two tones or as
complex as the ability to plan how to remember long list of names.
 Sternberg distinguishes between components and meta components. Components are the
steps one goes to through to solve a problem.
  Sternberg’s theory divides the cognitive processes that underlie intelligent behavior into
three specific components:
o Metacomponents: to plan and regulate our behavior. They are the higher-order
processes used to plan and regulate task performance. They include problem-
solving skills such as identifying problems, formulating hypotheses and strategies,
testing them logically, and evaluating performance feedback. Sternberg believes
that metacomponents are the fundamental sources of individual differences in
fluid intelligence. He finds that intelligent people spend more time framing
problems and developing strategies than do less intelligent people, who have a
tendency to plunge right in without sufficient forethought.
o Performance components are the actual mental processes used to perform the task.
They include perceptual processing, retrieving appropriate memories and schemas
from long-term memory, and generating responses.
o Finally, knowledge acquisition components allow us to learn from our
experiences, store information in memory, and combine new insights with
previously acquired information. These abilities underlie individual differences in
crystallized intelligence

 Sternberg believes that there is more than one kind of intelligence. He suggests that
environmental demands may call for three different classes of adaptive problem solving
and that people differ in their intellectual strengths in these areas:
1. Analytical intelligence involves the kinds of academically oriented problem-solving skills
measured by traditional intelligence tests.
2. Practical intelligence refers to the skills needed to cope with everyday demands and to manage
oneself and other people effectively.
3. Creative intelligence comprises the mental skills needed to deal adaptively with novel
problems.

For example: Sternberg found that Brazilian street children were very proficient at the math
required to carry on their street businesses, despite the fact that many of them had failed
mathematics in school.

Sternberg believes that educational programs should teach all three classes of skills, not just
analytical-academic skills. In studies with elementary school children, he and his colleagues have
shown that a curriculum that also teaches practical and creative skills results in greater mastery
of course material than does a traditional analytic, memory-based approach to learning course
content

Mental competencies

 Some psychologists think this is too limited a definition to capture the range of human
adaptations. They believe that intelligence may be more broadly conceived as relatively
independent intelligences that relate to different adaptive demands.

Gardner’s Multiple Intelligences

Focus: What kinds of abilities are included in Gardner’s multiple intelligences?
Harvard psychologist Howard Gardner (2003)
 Inspired by his observations of how specific human abilities are affected by brain
damage, Gardner advanced a theory of multiple intelligences. The number of
intelligences has varied as Gardner’s work has progressed; he currently defines eight
distinct varieties of adaptive abilities, and a possible ninth variety:

1. Linguistic intelligence: the ability to use language well, as writers do.

2. Logical-mathematical intelligence: the ability to reason mathematically and logically.
3. Visuospatial intelligence: the ability to solve spatial problems or to succeed in a field
such as architecture.
4. Musical intelligence: the ability to perceive pitch and rhythm and to understand and
produce music.
5. Bodily-kinesthetic intelligence: the ability to control body movements and skillfully
manipulate objects, as demonstrated by a highly skilled dancer, athlete, or surgeon.
6. Interpersonal intelligence: the ability to understand and relate well to others.
7. Intrapersonal intelligence: the ability to understand oneself
8. Naturalistic intelligence: the ability to detect and understand phenomena in the natural
world, as a zoologist or meteorologist might.

In recent writings, Gardner (2000) has also speculated about a ninth possible intelligence, which
he calls existential intelligence, a philosophically oriented ability to ponder questions about the
meaning of one’s existence, life, and death. Gardner’s first three intelligences are measured
by existing intelligence tests, but the others are not. Indeed, some of Gardner’s critics insist
that these other abilities are not really part of the traditional concept of intelligence at all and that
some of them are better regarded as talents. However, Gardner replies that the form of
intelligence that is most highly valued within a given culture depends on the adaptive
requirements of that culture

Gardner further suggests that these different classes of abilities require the functioning of
separate but interacting modules in the brain

Emotional Intelligence
Focus questions: Describe the four branches of emotional intelligence.

Another form of adaptive ability lies within the emotional realm, and some theorists believe that
emotional competence is a form of intelligence.

According to John Mayer and Peter Salovey, 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, and to regulate and control one’s own emotional responses.

According to Mayer and Salovey: Perceiving emotions is measured by people’s accuracy in

judging emotional expressions in facial photographs, as well as the emotional tones conveyed by
different landscapes and designs.
  Using emotions to facilitate thought is measured by asking people to identify the
emotions that would best enhance a particular type of thinking, such as how to deal with
a distressed coworker or plan a birthday party. To measure understanding emotions,
people are asked to specify the conditions under which their emotions change in intensity
or type; another task measures people’s understanding of which basic emotions blend
together to create subtle emotions, such as envy or jealousy.
 Finally, managing emotions is measured by asking respondents to indicate how they can
change their own or others’ emotions to facilitate success or increase interpersonal
harmony.
 Proponents of emotional intelligence point to the important adaptive advantages of
emotional skills in meeting the challenges of daily life, and they believe that the ability to
read, respond to, and manage emotions has evolutionary roots.
 Emotionally intelligent people, they suggest, form stronger emotional bonds with others;
enjoy greater success in careers, marriage, and childrearing; modulate their own emotions
so as to avoid strong depression, anger, or anxiety; and work more effectively toward
long-term goals by being able to control impulses for immediate gratification. In the end,
some people who are high in emotional intelligence may enjoy more success in life than
do others who surpass them in mental intelligence.
 They also tend to use more effective coping strategies. Some psychologists believe that
the concept of intelligence is being stretched too far from its original focus on mental
ability. They would prefer a different term, such as emotional competence, to distinguish
this concept from the traditional mental-skills concept of intelligence. But emotional-
intelligence proponents respond that if we regard intelligence as adaptive abilities, we
ought not limit ourselves to the purely cognitive realms of human ability. The debate
concerning multiple intelligence continues to rage and promises to do so into the future.

Cultural differences
How is intelligence assessed in non-Western cultures?

 Traditional intelligence tests such as the WAIS and the Stanford-Binet draw heavily on
the cognitive skills and learning that are needed to succeed in Western educational and
occupational settings.
 They tend to have strong verbal content and to rely on the products of Western schooling.
Taken into a cultural context where smart is defined in different ways and requires other
kinds of adaptive behavior, such tests cannot hope to measure intelligence in a valid
fashion.
 For example, the WAIS does not measure the ability to create herbal medicines, construct
shelters, or navigate in the open sea.
 Robert Sternberg (2004) has advanced a theory of successful intelligence in which
intelligence is whatever is required to meet the adaptive demands of a given culture.
Sternberg believes that fundamental mental skills are required for successful behavior in
any culture. These include the ability to mentally represent problems in a way that
facilitates their solution, to develop potential solutions and to choose successfully among
them, to utilize mental resources wisely, and to evaluate the effects of one’s action plans.
 What differs is the kinds of problems to which these basic intellectual skills are applied.
People from different cultures may think about the same problem in very different ways .
 Two main approaches have been taken to meet the challenges of cross-cultural
intelligence assessment. One is to choose reasoning problems that are not tied to the
knowledge base of any culture but that reflect the ability to process and evaluate stimulus
patterns.
 Raven Progressive Matrices, a test that is frequently used to measure fluid intelligence
On this nonverbal task, you must detect relationships and then decipher the rules
underlying the pattern of drawings in the rows and columns of the upper figure. Finally,
you must use this information to select the figure that is the missing entry from the eight
alternatives below.
 The Raven test has been used in many cultures and measures a general mental capacity
that is also measured by traditional intelligence tests in our culture (Jensen, 1998).
 Scores on the Raven correlate positively with measures of IQ derived from traditional
tests, yet they seem to be more “culture fair.”
 A second and more challenging approach is to create measures that are tailored to the
kinds of knowledge and skills that are valued in the particular culture. Such tests may
measure how smart an individual is in terms of the practical skills and adaptive behaviors
within that culture. Scores may be unrelated or even negatively correlated with other
measures of intelligence, yet they may predict successful functioning within that culture.
 If intelligence is defined as the ability to engage in culture-specific adaptive behavior,
then who is to say that the culture-specific measure is not a valid measure of intelligence
in that context?