Unit 5: Cognition and Intelligence

• concept and not a thing

• mental quality consisting of the ability to learn from experience, problem solve, and use knowledge to adapt to new situations

a method for assessing an individual’s mental aptitudes and comparing them with those of others, using numerical scores.

• intelligence has been operationally defined as whatever intelligence tests measure, which has tended to be school smarts.

• But intelligence is not a quality like height or weight, which has the same meaning to everyone around the globe. People assign the term intelligence to the qualities that enable success in their own time and in their own culture

• a general intelligence factor that, according to Spearman and others, underlies specific mental abilities and is therefore measured by every task on an intelligence test.

• Believed the g factor underlies all intelligence.

Factor analysis: a statistical procedure that identifies clusters of related items (called factors) on a test;

used to identify different dimensions of performance that underlie a person’s total score.

• a statistical procedure that identifies clusters of related items (called factors) on a test;

• used to identify different dimensions of performance that underlie a person’s total score.

score higher than average in other areas, such as spatial or reasoning ability.

• Opposed Spearman

• Identified seven clusters of primary mental abilities

  • word fluency, verbal comprehension, spatial ability, perceptual speed, numerical ability, inductive reasoning, and memory).

• Did not rank people on a single scale of general aptitude.

• a condition in which a person otherwise limited in mental ability has an exceptional specific skill such as computation or drawing

• think “s”pecial

• Views intelligence as multiple independent intelligences.

• Naturalist, Linguistic, Logical-Mathematical, Musical, Spatial, Bodily-Kinesthetic, Intrapersonal, Interpersonal

  • Have not been experimentally proven.

• Three Intelligences (Triarchic Theory)

• He believes you can increase your intelligence in all of these categories. Abilities are not fixed but flexible.

• PAC (he packed them together into only 3 intelligences)

(academic problem-solving)

Assessed by traditional intelligence tests which present well-defined problems such as having a single right answer.

Reacting adaptively to novel situations and generating innovative ideas. (Ex: inventions).

Required for everyday tasks, one’s ability to successfully interact with the everyday world, behave in successful ways in your environment (street smarts).

• Daniel Goleman

• The ability to perceive, understand, manage, and use emotions.

Perceiving emotions: (to recognize them in faces, music, stories).

Understanding emotions: to predict them and how they change and blend.

Managing emotions: to know how to express them in varied situations.

Using emotions: to enable adaptive or creative thinking.

(don’t really need to know by heart)

• Bigger is better.

• but some geniuses have small brains

• Brain scans reveal that smart people use less energy to solve problems

• Across many studies, the correlation between intelligence score and the speed of taking in perceptual information tends to be about +.3 to +.5 (Deary & Der, 2005; Sheppard & Vernon, 2008).

spear headed (first one)

(g) factor

Thurstone = thirsty for success

• disagreed with spearman

Thurstone = 9 letters

9 - 2 (two Ls) = 7

7 factors!

howard = 6 letters
gardner = 7 letters
8 independent intelligences!!

(musical, spatial, linguistic, logical-mathematical, bodily- kinesthetic, interpersonal, intrapersonal, naturalistic)

he’s stern so only 3

also call him rob (3 letters)

• had a fascination with measuring human traits.

• father of eugenics

• Galton’s quest for a simple intelligence measure failed

Francis Galton

When his cousin Charles Darwin proposed that nature selects successful traits through the survival of the fittest, Galton wondered if it might be possible to measure “natural ability” and to encourage those of high ability to mate with one another

• single practical purpose: to identify French schoolchildren needing special attention.

  • feared it would be used to label children

• with his collaborator, Théodore Simon, began by assuming that all children follow the same course of intellectual development

• goal became measuring each child’s mental age

a measure of intelligence test performance devised by Binet; the chronological age that most typically corresponds to a given level of performance. Thus, a child who does as well as the average 8-year-old is said to have a mental age of 8.

• Binet’s fears soon realized

• Terman found that the Paris-developed questions and age norms worked poorly with California schoolchildren. Adapting some of Binet’s original items, adding others, and establishing new age norms, Terman extended the upper end of the test’s range from teenagers to “superior adults.”

• Named it: the Stanford-Binet.

• For Terman, intelligence tests revealed the intelligence with which a person was born.

• ratio of mental age (ma) to chronological age (ca) multiplied by 100

• IQ = ma/ca × 100

• On contemporary intelligence tests: relative average performance of others at the same age (average performance = 100)

• achievement test a test designed to assess what a person has learned.

• aptitude test a test designed to predict a person’s future performance; aptitude is the capacity to learn.

• not only an overall intelligence score (Stanford-Binet), but also separate scores for verbal comprehension, perceptual organization, working memory, and processing speed.

psychologist who created what is now the most widely used individual intelligence test, the Wechsler Adult Intelligence Scale (WAIS)

defining uniform testing procedures and meaningful scores by comparison with the performance of a pretested group (representative of the population).

• the symmetrical, bell-shaped curve that describes the distribution of many physical and psychological attributes. Most scores fall near the average, and fewer and fewer scores lie near the extremes

• On an intelligence test, we call the midpoint, the average score, 100. Moving out from the average toward either extreme, we find fewer and fewer people.

• worldwide phenomenon that intelligence test performance was improving.

• causes: test sophistication, better nutrition, more education, stimulating environment, less childhood disease, smaller families, more parental investment

• the extent to which a test yields consistent results, as assessed by the consistency of scores on two halves of the test, on alternate forms of the test, or on retesting.

• check reliability by retesting people: may use same test or split test in half (odd and even)

the extent to which a test measures or predicts what it is supposed to.

(content validity and predictive validity)

the extend to which a test samples the behavior that is of interest

the success with which a test predicts the behavior it is designed to predict; it is assessed by computing the correlation between test scores and the criterion behavior

• cross-sectional: compare people of various ages in one time period.

  • found that older adults give fewer correct answers on intelligence tests than younger adults.

• longitudinal: retested the same cohort—the same group of people—over years

  • Until late in life, intelligence remained stable. On some tests, it even increased.

• crystallized intelligence our accumulated knowledge and verbal skills; tends to increase with age.

• fluid intelligence our ability to reason speedily and abstractly; tends to decrease during late adulthood.

• Identical twins also exhibit substantial similarity in specific talents

• Brain scans reveal that identical twins’ brains are built and function similarly. They have similar gray and white matter volume

• Their brains (unlike those of fraternal twins) are virtually the same in areas associated with verbal and spatial intelligence

• What do Adoption Studies reveal about intelligence?

• gist: their brains are similar (nature)

• the proportion of variation among individuals that we can attribute to genes. The heritability of a trait may vary, depending on the range of populations and environemtns studied. (range from 50 to 80 percent)

• During childhood, the intelligence test scores of adoptive siblings correlate modestly. Over time,adopted children accumulate experience in their differing adoptive families.

• Mental similarities between adopted children and their adoptive families wane with age,

  until the correlation approaches zero by adulthood. Genetic influences become more apparent as we accumulate

  life experience.

Genes and experience together weave the intelligence fabric. (Recall from Module 14 that epigenetics is one field that studies this nature–nurture meeting place.) But what we ac- complish with our intelligence depends also on our own beliefs and motivation.

epigenetics: study of how your behaviors and environment can cause changes that affect the way your genes work

• Later in childhood, schooling is one intervention that pays intelligence score dividends. Schooling and intelligence interact, and both enhance later income.

• Generally, the aptitude benefits dissipate over time (reminding us that life experience after Head Start matters, too)

• believe to be a long term benefit

• reports that believing intelligence is biologically set and unchanging can lead to a “fixed mindset.” Believing intelligence is changeable, a “growth mindset” results in a focus on learning and growing.

• Girls: better spellers, more verbally fluent, better at locating objects, better at detecting emotions, and more sensitive to touch, taste, and color

• Boys: tests of spatial ability (much stronger) and complex math problems

• math computation and overall math performance, boys and girls hardly differ

• Males’ mental ability scores also vary more than females’.

1) popular sense. consider a test biased if it detects not only innate differences in intelligence but also performance differences caused by cultural experiences.

2) scientific meaning. It hinges on a test’s validity—on whether it predicts future behavior only for some groups of test-takers. For example, if the SAT® exam accurately predicted the college achievement of women but not that of men, then the test would be biased.

• stereotype threat: a self- confirming concern that one will be evaluated based on a negative stereotype

• If, when taking an exam, you are worried that your type often doesn’t do well, your self-doubts and self-monitoring may hijack your working memory and impair your performance

Minority students in university programs that challenge them to believe in their potential, or to focus on the idea that intelligence is malleable and not fixed, have likewise produced markedly higher grades and had lower dropout rates