Brains and intelligence vary as much as humans do. Intellectual abilities can rise, fall, zigzag, or stay the same, depending on genes and on the specifics of each life. Intelligence is multi-directional, multi-cultural, multi-contextual, and plastic. Generally, brain functioning is maintained: if you think deep and clearly at age 20 you will probably do so at age 60.
One leading theoretician, Charles Spearman (1927), proposed that there is a single entity that he called general intelligence (g), which each adult has to some degree. Even though g cannot be measured directly, it can be inferred from various abilities, such as memory, reasoning, and vocabulary. Measuring those abilities produces an IQ score. That score correlates with health
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The first group is called fluid. As its name implies, fluid intelligence is like water, flowing to its own level no matter where it happens to be. Fluid intelligence is quick and flexible; enabling people to learn pretty much anything, even abstractions that are neither familiar nor connected to what they already know. Curiosity, learning for the joy of it, solving puzzles and the thrill of discovering something new are marks of fluid intelligence. Puzzles are often used to measure fluid intelligence, with speedy solutions given bonus points (as on many IQ tests). Immediate recall—of nonsense words, of numbers, of a sentence just read—is one indicator of fluid intelligence because working memory is crucial (Chuderski,2013; Nisbett et al.,2012). Since fluid intelligence appears to be disconnected from past learning, it may seem impractical. Not so. A study of adults aged 34 to 83 founds that people high in fluid intelligence were more exposed to stress but were less likely to suffer from it. They used their intellect to turn stresses into positive experiences (Stawski et al., 2010). The ability to detoxify stress may be one reason that high fluid intelligence in emerging adulthood leads to longer life and higher IQ later on. Fluid intelligence is associated with openness to new experiences and overall brain health (Batterham et al., …show more content…
He believes that successful intelligence is not simply the ability to do well in school but the ability to adapt to various cultural contexts, learning from experience. Obviously, the years of adulthood bring many experiences, which provide opportunities for intelligence to grow. Sternberg proposed three fundamental intelligences: analytic, creative, and practical, all which can be tested. Analytic intelligence includes all the mental processed that foster academic proficiency by making efficient learning, remembering, and thinking possible. Analytic strengths are vulnerable in emerging adulthood particularly in college, in graduate school, and in job training. Multiple-choice tests and brief essays call forth remembered information, with one and only one right answer, indicate analytic intelligence. Intellectual flexibility and innovation take a prime role in creative intelligence. Creative thinking is divergent rather than convergent, valuing the unexpected, imaginative, and unusual rather than standard and conventional answers. Sternberg developed tests of creative intelligence that include writing a short story titled ‘’The Octopus’s Sneakers’’ or planning an advertising campaign for a new doorknob. Those with many unusual ideas earn high scores. Practical intelligence involved adapting to the demands of a given situation, including understanding the expectations and needs of other people. This is
General intelligence tends to relate to various degrees with each other (Cohen 2012). An example of this is that if an individual is good in math, they may also be good in spelling. In this weeks reading we reviewed several different models of measurement of intelligence. In regard to these theories and general intelligence (g), the theories are various but have commonality and overlap. The Spearman's two-factor theory is if a test has high correlation with other test than the measurement of g is highly saturated (Cohen, 2012). The greater the importance of g on a test, the better the test is believed to predict intelligence
People learn new things every day. My grandmother would say “I just received a new wrinkle in my brain!” Maybe, this is not true, but it is true that we learn new things even as we grow older. There are many techniques to learning a new skill. “Howard Gardner 's theory of Multiple Intelligences utilizes aspects of cognitive and developmental psychology, anthropology, and sociology to explain the human intellect” (Zhou 77). Gardner introduced nine different intelligences. Gardner believed that humans possess each of the nine intelligences, even though some are stronger or weaker than others. He also believed that each person had their own individual intelligence profile. We took a multiple intelligence test to see our own strengths and weaknesses
Intelligence tests have been developed by scientists as a tool to categorize army recruits or analyze school children. But still discussing what intelligence is, academics have a difficult time defining what intelligence tests should measure. According to the American researcher Thorndike, intelligence is only that what intelligence tests claim it is (Comer, Gould, & Furnham, 2013). Thus, depending on what is being researched in the test and depending on the scientist’s definition of intelligence the meaning of the word intelligence may vary a lot. This essay will discuss what intelligence is in order to be able to understand the intelligence theories and aims of intelligence tests.
Charles Spearman's model of intelligence and Howard Gardner's multiple intelligence theory are two of the most widely used theories of intelligence. In order to understand how similar the two theories are we must first understand their differences. These two men differed in opinion on how IQ and intelligence should be measured, and they differed in opinion on what made a person "smart". In order to examine these things they first had to understand the human brain and how it works. They had to examine the human study habits and rituals, along with the human test taking habits.
Many psychology theories have been developed in order to determine how to measure intelligence. Volume 63 of the Annual Review of Psychology details a few studies citing popular theories from the 1970s to 2000 (Deary, 2012), including the measurement of, “sensory discrimination and reaction time,” (Deary, 2012). After 2000, however, “interest has focused, in the broadly psychometric-experimental levels, on processing speed and working memory as potential explanatory variables for intelligence,” (Deary, 2012). In measuring intelligence, scientists are focu...
Intelligence has been commonly thought to decline as we get older, however this is a flawed belief. Countless individuals will argue that there are various cognitive processes that are associated with changes in the brain that do deteriorate with time, however there are also other brain areas that increase their activity in older age. I believe a person’s ability to perform certain tasks may become slower as they get older, but this doesn’t automatically mean that they are cognitively getting less intelligent. There are numerous ways in which intelligence can be defined, although it is commonly defined as general cognitive skills, this means that it is a mental ability involved in the capacity of learning, reasoning, perceiving relationships and analogies, understanding, facts, meanings, etc. (Dictionary definition). However Raymond Cattell (1963) argued that ‘intelligence does not generally consist of only cognitive performance’. Cattell and Horns theory developed in 1966 and emphasises that intelligence is composed of a number of different abilities that interrelate to form the broad term of intelligence. The main two factors are crystallised and Fluid intelligence.
Intelligence is a function of how well the brain works, and it's well established that our brains are designed by genes so it's not entirely surprising that some deem this as proof that our genes play a part in deciding a person’s intelligence. However, this is not a widely accepted fact and many scholars would argue intelligence is indeed not fixed by ones genes but instead manipulated by other factors.
In this world, there are many different individuals who are not only different in demographics but also different neurologically. Due to an immense amount of people it is important to first understand each individual, in order, to better understand them and to help them when it comes to certain areas such as education, the work force, and etc…. For this reason psychologists have aimed to further understand individuals through the use of psychological assessments. This paper aims to examine a particular assessment tool, the Stanford-Binet Intelligence Scales (Fifth Edition), which measures both intelligence and cognitive abilities (Roid, 2003). This assessment is usually administered by psychologists and the scores are most often used to determine placement in academics and services allotted to children and adolescents (despite their compatibility for adults) (Wilson & Gilmore, 2012). Furthermore before the investigation dives into the particulars of the test, such as its strengths and weakness’, it is best to first learn more about the intelligence scales general characteristics.
Most researchers believe that we are born with a certain intelligence or potential intelligence. They also believe that the intelligence we are born with is difficult to change. Psychologists use short-answer tests to assess one’s intelligence (Gardner papers). It was believed that intelligence was a single inherited thing. Human beings start out initially as a blank slate and could be trained to learn anything, provided that it was presented in an appropriate way (Multiple Intelligences and Education). Currently an “increasing number of researchers believe the opposite. Gardner defined intelligence as: “the ability to create an effective product or offer a service that is valued in culture; a set ...
There are eight basic different intelligences: musical, body-kinesthetic, logical-mathematical, linguistic, spatial, interpersonal, intrapersonal, and naturalist. According to Gardner’s theory of Multiple Intelligences, people have many different ways of learning. Unlike traditional theories of intelligence that focus on one, single general intelligence, Gardner believed that people have multiple ways of thinking
One of the most definitive things ever said regarding the nature of intelligence was that intelligence is whatever IQ tests measure. The IQ test has been in use throughout the 20th century and serves as an accepted measure of a person’s intelligence. It is used by institutions such as schools and the army to screen people’s level of intelligence and decisions are made based on that. The IQ test consists of a series of questions regarding certain skills such as vocabulary, mathematics, spatial relations. The scores that a person gets on these tests depend on the amount of questions that a person answers correctly. The actual score that a person gets is dependant on how others in that age group do on those particular questions.
Can intelligence be measured? Does an IQ test actually measure a person’s intelligence? Does a high score indicate a genius? Does a low score indicate stupidity or merely ignorance? These questions have been asked over and over again by psychiatrists and scientists alike, but to date there are no clear answers. These questions cannot be answered without first defining what is meant by the term intelligence. Once intelligence has been defined then it should be easy to answer these questions; however, multiple definitions of the word tend to lead to further confusion.
On the ‘nature’ side of the debate is the psychometric approach, considered to be the most dominant in the study of intelligence, which “inspired the most research and attracted the most attention” (Neisser et al. 1996, p. 77). It argues that there is one general (‘g’) factor which accounts for intelligence. In the 1880s, Francis Galton conducted many tests (measuring reaction times to cognitive tasks), (Boundless 2013), in order to scientifically measure intelligence. These tests were linked to the eugenic breeding programme, which aimed to eliminate biologically inferior people from society. Galton believed that as intelligence was inherited, social class or position were significant indicators of intelligence. If an individual was of high social standing, they would be more intelligent than those of a lower position. However he failed to show any consistency across the tests for this hypothesis, weakening his theory that social class correlated with intelligence. Nevertheless, his creation of the intelligence test led many to continue to develop...
“Variation in IQ is accounted for by variation in home environment to the extent of not more than 4 percent; 96 percent of the variation is accounted for by other factors” (Leahy). “Measureable environment does not shift the IQ by more than 3 to 5 points above or below the value it would have had under normal environmental conditions. The nature or hereditary component in intelligence causes greater variation than does environment.... ... middle of paper ... ...
Verbal Intelligence; Non-verbal Intelligence; Concrete Reasoning; and Abstract Reasoning are several of the mental abilities that have been identified by psychologists (Santrock, 2013). Spearman’s thoughts were that intelligence is general cognitive ability that can be numerically expressed and measured.