PSY210H5 Lecture Notes - Lecture 6: Psychometrics, Job Performance, Habituation
Lecture 6 – Intelligence
What is intelligence?
- psychologists do not completely agree about how to define and measure intelligence
- Many tests assume to measure intelligence in infants, children and adults
- Some consensus among general public, university students, and psychologists
- People generally agree that 3 behaviours are involved:
o Problem solving abilities
o Verbal abilities
o Social competence
Major questions
- Are differences in intelligence caused by environmental factors, genetic factors, or both?
- Are these differences permanent, or can they be changed?
Issues defining theories of intelligence
- Is intelligence unitary or multi-faceted?
o one score or multiple dif scores in dif areas
- Is it determined by genetic or environmental factors?
- Does it predict success in school as well as success outside of school?
Concepts of intelligence
- Spearman – general and specific intelligence
o Intelligence is composed of
▪ a general factor (g) etal eeg
▪ specific factors (s) fatos uiue to a patiula ogitie task e. eal easoig
o g is involved in any task requiring cognitive activity (general intelligence)
o performance on dif types of tests should be correlated
- Contemporary approaches to intelligence
o influenced by information-processing models of cognition
o Steegs theo of suessful itelligee
▪ Intelligent behavior involves adapting to your environment
▪ More to intelligence than IQ scores or SAT scores
▪ Decide your own goals, intelligence is ability to meet those goals
▪ Figure out what you do really well and capitalize on it
▪ Teamwork – helps ith the thigs oue ot good at
▪ Cultural differences -> ex. only ¼ words describing academic intelligence, not as
important in certain cultures, mean different things, different skills are important
▪ No consistent gender differences in intelligence
• visual spatial ability – on avg men better at mental rotation tests, women
better on avg on spatial location tasks (remember where an item was, where
they saw a person)
▪ 3 major components to intelligence:
• Analytic ability: analyze problems and generating different solutions
• Creative ability: dealing adaptively with novel situations and problems
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• Practical ability: know what solution or plan will actually work (common
sense, ability to get along with others)
o Gades theo of ultiple itelligee
▪ People have very different kind of minds, learn in different ways
▪ Education is unfair – teaches everyone in the same way, prioritizes certain types of
intelligences
• Students have a superficial knowledge b/c too much is taught
• Remember little
• Wants to optimize education
▪ 3 criteria for a type of intelligence:
• Has a unique developmental history
o Develop or peak at different ages
o Different critical periods for development
• Is regulated by distinct regions in the brain
o Imaging studies, people with selective brain damage – impacts dif
tasks
• Has special cases of talented individuals
o Ex. social skills
▪ 9 distinct intelligences:
• Linguistic
• Logical-mathematical
• Spatial
• Musical
• Bodily-kinesthetic
• Interpersonal
o Concerned w capacity to understand the intentions, motivations and
desires of other people
o Allows people to work effectively with others
o Educators, sales people, leaders, counselors
• Intrapersonal
o Entails the capacity to undestad oeself, to appeiate oes
feelings, fears and motivations
o Effective working model of ourselves, and be able to use such
information to regulate our lives
• Naturalistic
• Existential
o Psychometrics
▪ Measurement of psychological traits/abilities
▪ Using standardized tests to identify individual differences
▪ Psychometrician – designer of intelligence tests (always s guided by a particular
theory of intelligence)
▪ Tests norms: are the values or sets of values that describe the typical performance
of a specific group of people
• Cat ipose os o a diffeet populatio
▪ Psychometrics vs Piaget
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