Unit 11 AP Psychology

Intelligence

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

• How smart you are

Intelligence Test

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

General Intelligence (g)

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.

• Ex. Problem solving skills

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.

• identifying "extraversion" from questions about social behaviors

Savant Syndrome

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

• The guy who could see a city and then draw it by memory

Grit

in psychology, grit is passion and perseverance in the pursuit of long-term goals.

Emotional Intelligence

the ability to perceive, understand, manage, and use emotions.

• How in touch you are with understanding someone’s feelings

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.

Standford-Binet

the widely used American revision (by Terman at Stanford University) of Binet’s original intelligence test.

• identifying picture absurdities

• verbal analogies

• repeating sequences of numbers

• assembling puzzles

• solving quantitative word problems

Intelligence Quotient (IQ)

defined originally as the ratio of mental age (ma) to chronological age (ca) multiplied by 100 (thus, IQ = ma/ca × 100). On contemporary intelligence tests, the average performance for a given age is assigned a score of 100, with scores assigned to relative performance above or below average

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

Wechsler Adult Intelligence Scale (WAIS)

the WAIS is the most widely used intelligence test; contains verbal and performance (nonverbal) subtests.

Standardization

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

Normal Curve

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.

Reliability

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.

Validity

the extent to which a test measures or predicts what it is supposed to. (See also contentvalidity and predictive validity.)

Content Validity

The extent to which a test samples the behavior that is of interest

Predictive validity

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. (Also called criterion-related validity.)

Cohort

A group of people from a given time period

Crystalized 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.

Intellectual disability

a condition of limited mental ability, indicated by an intelligence score of 70 or below and difficulty in adapting to the demands of life. (Formerly referred to as mental retardation.)

Down Syndrome

a condition of mild to severe intellectual disability and associated physical disorders caused by an extra copy of chromosome 21.

Heritability

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 environments studied.

Stereotype Threat

A self confirming concern that one will be evaluated based on a negative stereotype