PSYC205. Week 7. Lecture 13. Intelligence in childhood

Page 1: Introduction to Intelligence in Early Childhood

• Lecture Title: PSYC205 Week 7: Lecture 13 Intelligence in Early Childhood

• Instructor: Dr. Marina Bazhydai

• Contact: m.bazhydai@lancaster.ac.uk

• Institution: Lancaster University

Page 2: Learning Objectives

• Objectives of this Lecture:

  • Understand the nature of standardized intelligence testing in children.

  • Explore the relationship between early information processing and standardized intelligence tests.

  • Familiarize with the issues surrounding IQ testing, research, and alternative conceptions of intelligence.

Page 3: First Standardized Test of Intelligence

• Purpose: Identify children needing special education.

• Age Range: 50 children aged 3-10 participated.

• Tasks:

  • 30 short tasks that related to everyday life

  • Included activities like following a lighted match, naming body parts, and recalling digits.

  • Tasks ranged from simple to complex to assess a child's 'mental age.'

• Test: Binet-Simon scale, published in 1911.

Page 4: Stanford-Binet Test

• Sample: Developed from testing 1000 children aged 4-14.

• Improvements from the original test:

  • Tasks such as comparing line lengths and classic cognitive exercises for testing mental capabilities.

• Examples: At 4 years, children needed to match shapes; at 9 years, tasks included mental arithmetic and awareness of dates.

Page 5: what is an IQ

• Formula for IQ: IQ = (Mental Age / Chronological Age) x 100

  

• Average IQ: Set at 100.

• Mental Age: Refers to the cognitive developmental level corresponding to a child's age.

• Ratio: •‘mental age’ varies proportionally to the real age, e.g., if a 6 y.o. has a mental age of 5, when they are 10 y.o., they will have a mental age of 8

• Importance of Sample Size: Essential for creating age norms.

• Contributors: Developed by William Stern in 1912, adapting Binet's test, and formalized by Wechsler for comparative analysis.

  

Page 6: General Intelligence (g)

• Conceptualization: A theoretical approach to intelligence.

• Spearman’s Factor Analysis:

  • Revealed positive correlations across different tests.

  • Introduced the Two-factor Theory of Intelligence:

    • Specific Abilities: Unique skills in areas like math or verbal reasoning.

    • General Intelligence (g): Underlying abilities relating to problem-solving and drawing inferences.

Page 7: Mullen Scales of Early Learning as measure of g

• Purpose: Assessment for infants and preschool-aged children (0-68 months).

• Composite Score: Provides an estimate of overall intelligence and also emphasises five distinct subscales, not just one score:

  1. Gross Motor

  2. Fine Motor

  3. Visual Reception

  4. Receptive Language

  5. Expressive Language

Page 8: Infants and IQ During the Pandemic

• Research Findings: Decrease in IQ during COVID-19 pandemic.

• Scores: Average IQ for children aged 3 months to 3 years dropped from around 100 to 78.

• Possible Causes: Lack of stimulation and changes in childcare practices during the pandemic.

Page 9: Mullen Scales Overview

• Test Format: Visual representation available through a linked video :

  

Page 10: Critical Evaluation of Cognitive Measures

• Study: Impact of COVID-19 on cognitive development presented through longitudinal observational studies.

  

• Data Presentation: Graphs displaying trends over time from 2010-2022.

  

Page 11: Alternative Explanations for Lower IQ

• Considerations: Test context, unfamiliarity, and stressors like face coverings impacted infant performance during tests conducted in the pandemic.

  • “infants may have performed less well on the test because it was administered by a stranger, wearing a face covering, in an unfamiliar environment – all of which would differentially impact the performance of babies born during the pandemic”.

• is intelligence fixed or not?

• is it nature or nurture?

Page 12: Bayley’s Scales of Infant Development

• Study Duration: Longitudinal Berkeley Growth Study (1928-1964).

• Age Range: 1 month - 3.5 years.

• Five Scales:

  • cognition,

  • motor skills

  • language interaction

  • parental reports on social-emotional behaviour.

  • parental reports of child’s adaptive behaviour

• Correlation to Later IQ: Limited correlation with only two scales predicting future IQ, indicating potential discontinuities.

Page 13: Prenatal Maternal Stress and child IQ

• Findings: High levels of prenatal stress linked to lower IQ and language abilities in 5-year-olds.

  • •5-year-old children exposed in utero to high levels of objective stress had lower IQ and language abilities compared to children exposed to low or moderate levels of objective prenatal maternal stress

• Measures of IQ:

  • Wechsler Preschool and Primary Scale of Intelligence-Revised (WPPSI-R)

  • Peabody Picture Vocabulary Test-Revised (PPVT-R)

Page 14: Standardized Measures in Older Children

• Wechsler Intelligence scale for children:

  • verbal and non- verbal measures : verbal fluency, picture completion, block design, memory span, etc.

• Peabody Picture vocab test

  • a measure of verbal ability, quickly evaluate receptive vocabulary without requiring reading or writing

Page 15: Infants cognitive development and early Intelligence

• Basic Cognitive Abilities, however defined, underly intelligent functioning

• Research: Relationships between early learning, memory, perception, attention, and later intelligence assessed.

Page 16: Theoretical Approaches to Intelligence

• Piaget’s Approach: Investigated children's problem-solving based on developmental stages.

• Psychometric Approach: Analysis within standardized tests for to predict future performance.

• Information-Processing Approach: Focus on cognitive mechanisms for processing information.

Page 17: Habituation paradigm as a test

• Test Method: Repeated presentation of a stimulus until attention decreases, then novel stimulus is introduced and the increase in attention is measured.

• Assumption: Increased attention to a new stimulus indicates recognition and cognitive processing. if they look longer at the new stimulus we can assume that they can distinguish between the objects

  

Page 18: Speed of Habituation

• Short Lookers: Babies who quickly habituate to a stimulus might be relatively fast at processing information, thus capable of learning that something is familiar in only a few trails

• Long Lookers: Babies who take longer to habituate to the same stimulus, requiring more trials to accurately and completely encode a stimulus in memory

Page 19: Visual Novelty Preference

• Visual recognition memory requires to encode a stimulus, recognize it as familiar, and recognize an alternative stimulus as novel

• 7-mo-olds: Looking preference for a novel visual stimulus (a face) over a different face which was already familiar (Fagan, 1984)

• Measure: time spent looking at novel image

  

Page 20: Continuity of Habituation Measures and IQ

• Preterm infants fixing on an unchanging stimulus linked to lower IQ later in life.

• Neonate measure of total fixation time on unchanging stimulus predicted IQ at 8 and 12 years; measures at 4 months did not add to the associations.

  

Page 21: Predictive Power of Information Processing Measures

• Meta-analysis : speed of habituation and novelty preference related to later intelligence r = .44 at 2-3 years and .56 at 6-year follow-up

• •Infants who spent a long time to process an unchanging stimulus (inefficient processing) as neonates had lower IQ later in life

  

Page 22: The Flynn Effect

• IQ scores increase across time in developed countries at a startlingly consistent rate of approximately 0.33 points per year, or 3.3 points per decade (Flynn, 1984, 1987)

• Confounding of generational effects with changes in test content

• Increased schooling, greater educational attainment of parents, better nutrition, and less childhood disease

• Evidence of environmental factors on IQ

Page 23: Controversies of Psychometric IQ Tests

• Pros:

  • Standardized, normed, reliable, valid

  • good predictive validity of later achievements

• Cons:

  • Potential underestimation of children’s abilities whoa re ill, tired, bored

  • issues of cultural fairness

  • don’t directly measure ability - instead infer intelligence from what children already know (static nature of test)

Page 24: Dynamic Testing of Intelligence

• Concept: Based on Vygotsky’s theory of learning through scaffolded interactions.

• Focus: Assessing potential rather than current achievement, fostering a dynamic learning process.

• •Potential rather than present achievement – what is the child READY to learn?

  •Dynamic, constructive nature of intelligence – learning process rather than products of past learning

  •Contains items up to 2 years above a child’s current level of competence

  •Examiners help the child when necessary by asking leading questions, giving examples or demonstrations, offering feedback

Page 25: Gardner's Multiple Intelligences

• Proposed by Howard Gardner in the Frames of Mind, 1983:

  1.Logical/Mathematical

  2.Language/ Linguistic

  3.Musical

  4.Visual/Spatial

  5.Kinesthetic/Bodily Movement

  6.Interpersonal 

  7.Intrapersonal

  8.Naturalist

  9.Existentialist

• Interpersonal and intrapersonal - planted seeds for Emotional Intelligence (EQ) framework

   (Mayer & Salovey, 1990)

Page 26: Is intelligence malleable

• •“Process” view of intelligence instead of “Product”

• Genetic and environmental interactions

• Socio-economic status, e.g., parental education, modifies heritability estimates of IQ (Turkheimer et al., 2003): twin studies in US, IQs of children from low SES families were primarily influenced by environment, while IQs of affluent families’ children largely determined by genetics

• But infants’ cognitive information-processing abilities do not seem to differ based on SES (Smith et al., 2002)

• Does cognitive training work? – No sufficient evidence so far

Page 27: The Mozart Effect

• Conclusion: High-profile studies on music's impact on cognition, particularly spatial tasks, challenged and invalidated the idea that Mozart makes babies smart.

Page 28: Impact of Arts Education

• Cognitive transfer hypothesis : art curriculum builds critical thinking skills, not just aesthetic engagement, that students transfer to other settings, domains, and other academic subjects, including writing, math, social studies, and science

Page 29: Influence of Music on Intelligence

• Random assignment to keyboard music lessons, voice music lessons, drama lessons, or no lessons group

• IQ and social behaviour measured before and after lessons

• Compared with children in the control groups, children in both music groups exhibited greater increases in IQ

• Children in the drama group exhibited substantial improvements in adaptive social behaviour

Page 30: Conclusions

• •Intelligence can be viewed differently from information processing and psychometric perspectives

  •Intelligence exhibits a high degree of stability across development, starting in infancy

  -Performance on habituation and visual novelty preference paradigms captures a domain-general cognitive skill reflecting processing speed underlying cognitive continuity from infancy to later development, and is predictive of later IQ

  •Standardized measures of IQ are criticised for over-emphasis on logical skills

  •Alternative conceptions of intelligence exist, e.g., multiple intelligences

Page 32: Core Readings

• Primary Text:

  • Bornstein, M. H. (2020). Intelligence in infancy. In R. J. Sternberg (Ed.), The Cambridge handbook of intelligence.

• Optional Readings:

  • Studies on continuity in mental development and intelligence in infancy to encapsulate diverse perspectives.