What
is Intelligence?
Researchers define intelligence as the “ability to reason, plan, solve problems, think abstractly, comprehend complex ideas, learn quickly, and learn from experience.”
In Oxforddictioneries.com
the ability to acquire and apply knowledge and skills : an eminent man of great intelligence
Researchers define intelligence as the “ability to reason, plan, solve problems, think abstractly, comprehend complex ideas, learn quickly, and learn from experience.”
In Oxforddictioneries.com
the ability to acquire and apply knowledge and skills : an eminent man of great intelligence
[count
noun] a person or being with the ability to acquire and
apply knowledge and skills : extraterrestrial
intelligences.
In Dictionary.com
Capacity of learning, reasoning, understanding, and similar forms of mental activity; aptitude in grasping truths, relationships, facts, meaning, etc.
In World Dictionary
The capacity for understanding; ability to perceive and comprehendmeaning.
In Merriam Webster.com
The ability to learn or understand or to deal with new or trying situations; also : the ability to apply knowledge to manipulate one's environment or to think abstractly as measured by objective criteria (as tests).
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Intelligence has been defined in many different ways including, but not limited to, logic, abstract thought, understanding, self-awareness,communication, learning, having emotional knowledge, retaining, planning, and problem solving.
Intelligence is most widely studied in humans, but has also been observed in animals and in plants. Artificial intelligence is the simulation of intelligence in machines.
Within the discipline of psychology, various approaches to human intelligence have been adopted. The psychometric approach is especially familiar to the general public, as well as being the most researched and by far the most widely used in practical settings.
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Researcher
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Quotation
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Judgment, otherwise called
"good sense," "practical sense," "initiative,"
the faculty of adapting one's self to circumstances ... auto-critique.[8]
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The aggregate or global capacity
of the individual to act purposefully, to think rationally, and to deal
effectively with his environment.[9]
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"...the resultant of the
process of acquiring, storing in memory, retrieving, combining, comparing,
and using in new contexts information and conceptual skills."
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Innate general cognitive ability.
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To my mind, a human intellectual
competence must entail a set of skills of problem solving —
enabling the individual to resolve genuine problems or difficulties that he
or she encounters and, when appropriate, to create an effective product — and
must also entail the potential for finding or creating problems — and thereby
laying the groundwork for the acquisition of new knowledge.
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The ability to deal with cognitive
complexity.
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Sternberg &
Salter
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Goal-directed adaptive
behavior.
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The theory of Structural Cognitive
Modifiability describes intelligence as "the unique propensity of human beings
to change or modify the structure of their cognitive functioning to adapt to
the changing demands of a life situation."
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What is considered intelligent varies with culture. For example, when asked to sort, the Kpelle people take a functional approach. A Kpelle participant stated "the knife goes with the orange because it cuts it." When asked how a fool would sort, they sorted linguistically, putting the knife with other implements and the orange with other foods, which is the style considered intelligent in other cultures.
Human Intelligence
Psychometrics
The IQs of a large enough population are calculated so that they conform to a normal distribution
The approach to
understanding intelligence with the most supporters and published research over
the longest period of time is based on psychometric testing. It is also by far
the most widely used in practical settings.Intelligence quotient (IQ)
tests include the Stanford-Binet, Raven's Progressive Matrices,
the Wechsler Adult Intelligence Scale and
the Kaufman Assessment Battery for Children.
There are also psychometric tests that are not intended to measure intelligence
itself but some closely related construct such as scholastic aptitude. In the
United States examples include the SSAT, the SAT, the ACT,
the GRE,
the MCAT,
the LSAT,
and the GMAT.
Intelligence
tests are widely used in educational, business, and military settings
because of their efficacy in predicting behavior. IQ and g (discussed
in the next section) are correlated with many important social
outcomes—individuals with low IQs are more likely to be divorced, have a child
out of marriage, be incarcerated, and need long-term welfare support, while
individuals with high IQs are associated with more years of education, higher
status jobs and higher income. Intelligence is significantly correlated
with successful training and performance outcomes, and IQ/g is the
single best predictor of successful job performance.
General intelligence factor
or g
There are many
different kinds of IQ tests using a wide variety of test tasks. Some tests
consist of a single type of task, others rely on a broad collection of tasks
with different contents (visual-spatial, verbal, numerical) and asking for
different cognitive processes (e.g., reasoning, memory, rapid decisions, visual
comparisons, spatial imagery, reading, and retrieval of general knowledge).
The psychologist Charles Spearman early
in the 20th century carried out the first formal factor analysis of correlationsbetween
various test tasks. He found a trend for all such tests to correlate positively
with each other, which is called a positive manifold. Spearman
found that a single common factor explained the positive correlations among
tests. Spearman named it g for "general intelligence factor".
He interpreted it as the core of human intelligence that, to a larger or
smaller degree, influences success in all cognitive tasks and thereby creates
the positive manifold. This interpretation of g as a common
cause of test performance is still dominant in psychometrics. An alternative interpretation
was recently advanced by van der Maas and colleagues. Their mutualism
model assumes that intelligence depends on several independent
mechanisms, none of which influences performance on all cognitive tests. These
mechanisms support each other so that efficient operation of one of them makes
efficient operation of the others more likely, thereby creating the positive
manifold.
IQ tasks and
tests can be ranked by how highly they load on the g factor.
Tests with high g-loadings are those that correlate highly with
most other tests. One comprehensive study investigating the correlations
between a large collection of tests and tasks has found that the Raven's Progressive Matrices have
a particularly high correlation with most other tests and tasks. The Raven's is
a test of inductive reasoning with abstract visual material. It consists of a
series of problems, sorted approximately by increasing difficulty. Each problem
presents a 3 x 3 matrix of abstract designs with one empty cell; the matrix is
constructed according to a rule, and the person must find out the rule to
determine which of 8 alternatives fits into the empty cell. Because of its high
correlation with other tests, the Raven's Progressive Matrices are generally
acknowledged as a good indicator of general intelligence. This is problematic,
however, because there are substantial gender differences on the Raven's, which
are not found when g is measured directly by computing the
general factor from a broad collection of tests.
Historical psychometric theories
Several
different theories of intelligence have historically been important. Often they
emphasized more factors than a single one like in g factor.
Cattell-Horn-Carroll theory
Main article: Cattell-Horn-Carroll theory
Many of the
broad, recent IQ tests have been greatly influenced by the Cattell-Horn-Carroll theory. It is argued
to reflect much of what is known about intelligence from research. A hierarchy
of factors is used. g is at the top. Under it there are 10
broad abilities that in turn are subdivided into 70 narrow abilities. The broad
abilities are:
·
Fluid Intelligence (Gf): includes
the broad ability to reason, form concepts, and solve problems using unfamiliar
information or novel procedures.
·
Crystallized Intelligence (Gc):
includes the breadth and depth of a person's acquired knowledge, the ability to
communicate one's knowledge, and the ability to reason using previously learned
experiences or procedures.
·
Quantitative Reasoning (Gq): the
ability to comprehend quantitative concepts and relationships and to manipulate
numerical symbols.
·
Reading & Writing Ability (Grw):
includes basic reading and writing skills.
·
Short-Term Memory (Gsm): is the
ability to apprehend and hold information in immediate awareness and then use
it within a few seconds.
·
Long-Term Storage and Retrieval
(Glr): is the ability to store information and fluently retrieve it later in
the process of thinking.
·
Visual Processing (Gv): is the
ability to perceive, analyze, synthesize, and think with visual patterns,
including the ability to store and recall visual representations.
·
Auditory Processing (Ga): is the
ability to analyze, synthesize, and discriminate auditory stimuli, including
the ability to process and discriminate speech sounds that may be presented
under distorted conditions.
·
Processing Speed (Gs): is the
ability to perform automatic cognitive tasks, particularly when measured under
pressure to maintain focused attention.
·
Decision/Reaction Time/Speed (Gt):
reflect the immediacy with which an individual can react to stimuli or a task
(typically measured in seconds or fractions of seconds; not to be confused with
Gs, which typically is measured in intervals of 2–3 minutes). See Mental chronometry.
Modern tests do
not necessarily measure of all of these broad abilities. For example, Gq and
Grw may be seen as measures of school achievement and not IQ. Gt may be
difficult to measure without special equipment.
g was
earlier often subdivided into only Gf and Gc which were thought to correspond
to the Nonverbal or Performance subtests and Verbal subtests in earlier
versions of the popular Wechsler IQ test. More recent research has shown the
situation to be more complex.
Controversies
While not
necessarily a dispute about the psychometric approach itself, there are several
controversies regarding the results from psychometric research. Examples are
the role of genetics vs. environment, the causes of average group differences,
or the Flynn
effect.
One criticism
has been against the early research such as craniometry. A
reply has been that drawing conclusions from early intelligence research is
like condemning the auto industry by criticizing the performance of the Model T.
Several
critics, such as Stephen Jay Gould,
have been critical of g, seeing it as a statistical artifact, and
that IQ tests instead measure a number of unrelated abilities. The
American Psychological Association's report "Intelligence: Knowns and Unknowns"
stated that IQ tests do correlate and that the view that g is
a statistical artifact is a minority one.
Other theories
There are
critics of IQ, who do not dispute the stability of IQ test scores or the fact
that they predict certain forms of achievement rather effectively. They do
argue, however, that to base a concept of intelligence on IQ test scores alone
is to ignore many important aspects of mental ability.
On the other
hand, Linda S. Gottfredson (2006)
has argued that the results of thousands of studies support the importance of
IQ for school and job performance (see also the work of Schmidt & Hunter, 2004).
IQ also predicts or correlates with numerous other life outcomes. In contrast,
empirical support for non-g intelligences is lacking or very poor.
She argued that despite this the ideas of multiple non-g intelligences
are very attractive to many because they suggest that everyone can be
intelligent in some way.
Multiple intelligences
Howard Gardner's theory of multiple intelligences is
based on studies not only of normal children and adults but also by studies of
gifted individuals (including so-called "savants"),
of persons who have suffered brain damage, of experts and virtuosos,
and of individuals from diverse cultures. This led Gardner to break
intelligence down into at least a number of different components. In the first
edition of his book "Frames of Mind" (1983), he described seven
distinct types of intelligence - logical-mathematical, linguistic, spatial, musical,kinesthetic, interpersonal,
and intrapersonal.
In a second edition of this book, he added two more types of intelligence
- naturalist and existential intelligences.
He argues that psychometric tests address only linguistic and logical plus some
aspects of spatial intelligence. A major criticism of Gardner's theory is
that it has never been tested, or subjected to peer review, by Gardner or
anyone else, and indeed that it is unfalsifiable. Others
(e.g. Locke, 2005) have suggested that recognizing many specific forms of
intelligence (specific aptitude theory) implies a political—rather than
scientific—agenda, intended to appreciate the uniqueness in all individuals,
rather than recognizing potentially true and meaningful differences in
individual capacities. Schmidt and Hunter (2004) suggest that the predictive
validity of specific aptitudes over and above that of general mental ability,
or "g", has not received empirical support.
Howard Gardner
mentions in his Multiple Intelligences The Theory in Practice book,
briefly about his main seven intelligences he introduced. In his book, he
starts off describing Linguistic and Logical Intelligence because he believed
that in society, we have put these two intelligences on a pedestal. However,
Gardner believes all of the intelligences he found are equal. Note: At the time
of the publication of Gardner's book Multiple Intelligences The Theory in
Practice, naturalist and existential intelligences were not mentioned.
Linguistic Intelligence:
People high in linguistic Intelligence have an affinity for words, both spoken
and written.
Logical-Mathematics Intelligence:
Is logical and mathematical ability, as well as scientific ability. Howard
Gardner believed Jean Piaget may have thought he was studying all intelligence,
but in truth, Piaget was really only focusing on the logical mathematical
intelligence.
Spatial intelligence:
The ability to form a mental model of a spatial world and to be able to
maneuver and operate using that model.
Musical
Intelligence: Those with musical Intelligence
have excellent pitch, and may even be absolute pitch.
Bodily-kinesthetic
intelligence: The ability to solve problems or
to fashion products using one's whole body, or parts of the body. For example,
dancers, athletes, surgeons, craftspeople, etc.
Interpersonal intelligence:
The ability to see things from the perspective of others, or to understand
people in the sense of empathy. Strong interpersonal intelligence would be an
asset in those who are teachers, politicians, clinicians, religious leaders,
etc.
Intrapersonal intelligence:
A correlative ability, turned inward. It is a capacity to form an
accurate, veridical model of oneself and to be
able to use that model to operate effectively in life.
Triarchic theory of intelligence
Main article: Triarchic theory of intelligence
Robert Sternberg proposed
the triarchic theory of intelligence to
provide a more comprehensive description of intellectual competence than
traditional differential or cognitive theories of human ability. The
triarchic theory describes three fundamental aspects of intelligence. Analytic intelligence
comprises the mental processes through which intelligence is expressed.
Creative intelligence is necessary when an individual is confronted with a
challenge that is nearly, but not entirely, novel or when an individual is
engaged in automatizing the performance of a task. Practical intelligence is
bound in a sociocultural milieu and involves adaptation to, selection of, and
shaping of the environment to maximize fit in the context. The triarchic theory
does not argue against the validity of a general intelligence factor; instead,
the theory posits that general intelligence is part of analytic intelligence,
and only by considering all three aspects of intelligence can the full range of
intellectual functioning be fully understood.
More recently, the
triarchic theory has been updated and renamed the Theory of Successful
Intelligence by Sternberg. Intelligence is defined as an individual's
assessment of success in life by the individual's own (idiographic) standards and within the
individual's sociocultural context. Success is achieved by using combinations
of analytical, creative, and practical intelligence. The three aspects of
intelligence are referred to as processing skills. The processing skills are
applied to the pursuit of success through what were the three elements of
practical intelligence: adapting to, shaping of, and selecting of one's
environments. The mechanisms that employ the processing skills to achieve
success include utilizing one's strengths and compensating or correcting for
one's weaknesses.
Sternberg's
theories and research on intelligence remain contentious within the scientific
community.
PASS Theory of Intelligence
Based on A. R. Luria’s
(1966) seminal work on the modularization of brain function, and supported
by decades of neuroimaging research, the PASS Theory of Intelligence
proposes that cognition is organized in three systems and four processes. The
first is the Planning, which involves executive functions responsible for
controlling and organizing behavior, selecting and constructing strategies, and
monitoring performance. The second is the Attention process, which is
responsible for maintaining arousal levels and alertness, and ensuring focus on
relevant stimuli. The next two are called Simultaneous and Successive
processing and they involve encoding, transforming, and retaining information.
Simultaneous processing is engaged when the relationship between items and
their integration into whole units of information is required. Examples of this
include recognizing figures, such as a triangle within a circle vs. a circle
within a triangle, or the difference between ‘he had a shower before breakfast’
and ‘he had breakfast before a shower.’ Successive processing is required for
organizing separate items in a sequence such as remembering a sequence of words
or actions exactly in the order in which they had just been presented. These
four processes are functions of four areas of the brain. Planning is broadly
located in the front part of our brains, the frontal lobe. Attention and
arousal are combined functions of the frontal lobe and the lower parts of the
cortex, although the parietal lobes are also involved in attention as well.
Simultaneous processing and Successive processing occur in the posterior region
or the back of the brain. Simultaneous processing is broadly associated with
the occipital and the parietal lobes while Successive processing is broadly
associated with the frontal-temporal lobes. The PASS
(Planning/Attention/Simultaneous/Successive) theory is heavily indebted to both
Luria (1966, 1973), and studies in cognitive psychology involved in promoting a
better look at intelligence.
Piaget's theory and Neo-Piagetian
theories
Main articles: Piaget's theory of cognitive
development and Neo-Piagetian
theories of cognitive development
In Piaget's theory of cognitive development the
focus is not on mental abilities but rather on a child's mental models of the
world. As a child develops, increasingly more accurate models of the world are
developed which enable the child to interact with the world better. One example
being object permanence where the
child develops a model where objects continue to exist even when they cannot be
seen, heard, or touched.
Piaget's theory
described four main stages and many sub-stages in the development. These four
main stages are:
·
sensory motor stage (birth-2yrs);
·
pre-operational stage (2yrs-7rs);
·
concrete operational stage
(7rs-11yrs); and
Degree of
progress through these stages are correlated, but not identical with
psychometric IQ. Piaget conceptualizes intelligence as an activity more
than a capacity.
One of Piaget's
most famous studies focused purely on the discriminative abilities of children
between the ages of two and a half years old, and four and a half years old. He
began the study by taking children of different ages and placing two lines of
sweets, one with the sweets in a line spread further apart, and one with the
same number of sweets in a line placed more closely together. He found that,
"Children between 2 years, 6 months old and 3 years, 2 months old
correctly discriminate the relative number of objects in two rows; between 3
years, 2 months and 4 years, 6 months they indicate a longer row with fewer
objects to have "more"; after 4 years, 6 months they again
discriminate correctly".[47]Initially
younger children were not studied, because if at four years old a child could
not conserve quantity, then a younger child presumably could not either. The
results show however that children that are younger than three years and two
months have quantity conservation, but as they get older they lose this
quality, and do not recover it until four and a half years old. This attribute
may be lost temporarily because of an overdependence on perceptual strategies,
which correlates more candy with a longer line of candy, or because of the
inability for a four-year-old to reverse situations. By the end of this
experiment several results were found. First, younger children have a
discriminative ability that shows the logical capacity for cognitive operations
exists earlier than acknowledged. This study also reveals that young children
can be equipped with certain qualities for cognitive operations, depending on
how logical the structure of the task is. Research also shows that children
develop explicit understanding at age 5 and as a result, the child will count
the sweets to decide which has more. Finally the study found that overall
quantity conservation is not a basic characteristic of humans' native
inheritance.
Piaget's theory
has been criticized for the age of appearance of a new model of the world, such
as object permanence, being dependent on how the testing is done (see the
article on object permanence). More
generally, the theory may be very difficult to test empirically because of the
difficulty of proving or disproving that a mental model is the explanation for
the results of the testing.
Neo-Piagetian theories of cognitive
development expand Piaget's theory in various ways such as also
considering psychometric-like factors such as processing speed and working
memory, "hypercognitive" factors like self-monitoring, more stages,
and more consideration on how progress may vary in different domains such as
spatial or social.
Latent inhibition
Latent inhibition has
been related to elements of intelligence, namely creativity and genius.
Evolution of intelligence
The ancestors
of modern
humans evolved large and complex brains exhibiting an
ever-increasing intelligence through a long evolutionary process (see Homininae).
Different explanations have been proposed.
Improving intelligence
Eugenics is
a social philosophy which advocates the improvement of human hereditary traits
through various forms of intervention. Conscious efforts to influence
intelligence raise ethical issues. Eugenics has variously been regarded as
meritorious or deplorable in different periods of history, falling greatly into
disrepute after the defeat of Nazi Germanyin World War II.
Neuroethics considers
the ethical, legal and social implications of neuroscience, and deals with
issues such as the difference between treating a human neurological disease
and enhancing the human brain, and how wealth impacts access to
neurotechnology. Neuroethical issues interact with the ethics of human genetic engineering.
Because
intelligence appears to be at least partly dependent on brain structure and the
genes shaping brain development, it has been proposed that genetic engineering could be
used to enhance the intelligence, a process sometimes called biological uplift in science fiction.
Experiments on mice have demonstrated superior ability in learning and memory
in various behavioral tasks.
IQ leads to
greater success in education,[53] but
independently education raises IQ scores. Attempts to raise IQ with brain
training have led to increases on the training tasks – for instance working memory –
but it is as yet unclear if these generalise to increased intelligence per se.
Transhumanist theorists
study the possibilities and consequences of developing and using techniques to
enhance human abilities and aptitudes, and individuals ameliorating what they
regard as undesirable and unnecessary aspects of the human condition.
Substances
which actually or purportedly improve intelligence or other mental functions
are called nootropics.
A 2008 research
paper claimed that practicing a dual n-back task
can increase fluid intelligence (Gf), as
measured in several different standard tests. This finding received some
attention from popular media, including an article in Wired. However,
a subsequent criticism of the paper's methodology questioned the experiment's
validity and took issue with the lack of uniformity in the tests used to
evaluate the control and test groups. For example, the progressive nature
of Raven's Advanced Progressive Matrices (APM)
test may have been compromised by modifications of time restrictions (i.e., 10
minutes were allowed to complete a normally 45-minute test).
Correlates
According to
Rosemary Hopcroft, a sociologist at the University of North Carolina at
Charlotte, intelligence is inversely linked with sexual frequency (people with
higher levels of education often report lower numbers of sexual
partners). In parallel, self-reported intelligence has been linked
to unconventional
sexual practices and frequent sexual activity,
thoughts and fantasies.
Some studies
have shown a direct link between an increased birth weight and an
increased intelligence quotient.
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