Intelligence Notes

Last Lecture of the Trimester

• Welcome to the last lecture.
• Reminder that assignment is due on Friday.
• Consolidation week next week for catching up.
• Reflections on lecture and seminar content will be posted.
• The instructor will be at the National Suicide Prevention Conference in Perth next week and will post reflections on the unit site.

Intelligence

• Today's topic is intelligence.
• The lecture is taking place on the lands of the Wurundjeri people.
• This is the last week of PASS sessions; this week's topic focuses on intelligence, a case study on IQ testing, and exam revision.
• Exam timetable is available on Student Connect.
• Intelligence is a large concept that means different things to different people in different contexts.
• Examples include intelligent behavior in animals and variations across cultures.
• Some consider "book smarts" as intelligence, while others value "street smarts," or the ability to adapt to different environments.
• Intelligence as a psychological concept has been around since around the 20th century, but the definition has changed over time.
• Terms like emotional intelligence and social intelligence are relatively new.
• Definition of intelligence for this lecture: the capacity to learn from experiences, use metacognitive processes to enhance learning, and adapt to the environment within different social and cultural contexts.

Key Terms in the Definition of Intelligence

• Learning from experience: applying what is learned in one situation to other similar situations (generalization from classical conditioning).
• Example: Applying knowledge from one assignment to other assessments of a similar type.
• Ravens and crows are examples of intelligent birds that can learn from experience - using tools to get treats out of bottles.
• Adapting to the environment: behaving appropriately and usefully in different environments.
• Examples of different environments: educational, home, peer group, work.
• Adapting behavior to be respectful when visiting another culture.
• "Adaptive" generally means positive change, while "maladaptive" means not so positive change.
• Metacognition: thinking about one's own thinking and problem-solving skills.
• Reflecting on learning processes.

Biological Basis of Intelligence

• Intelligence has around a 50% genetic component.
• Simplified explanation: intelligent parents are likely to have intelligent children, but it's not deterministic.
• Correlative studies are generally used to determine this; causal research is not possible.
• A bigger brain may correlate with higher intelligence.
• Intelligent brains are more efficient and use less energy to solve complex tasks; energy usage can be measured using brain imaging techniques.
• Brain size, energy usage, and genetics are factors, but they don't fully explain intelligence; the environment also plays a role.
• Bigger brains don't always mean greater intelligence.
• Men generally have bigger brains than women, but there are no differences in overall intelligence.
• Encephalization quotient: brain size relative to body size.

Environmental Factors Affecting Intelligence

• Family environment: Aside from genetics, factors like better nutrition, more time, and financial resources may influence intelligence.
• School culture: Schools focused on academic ability may produce more academically inclined individuals.
• Wider cultural expectations and norms: Cultural expectations around academic achievement and societal norms can impact intelligence.
• Treatment of children: the way children are treated impacts how intelligent they perceive themselves to be
  • If treated as capable, they may perceive themselves as more intelligent.

Theories of Intelligence

CHC Theory (Cattell-Horn-Carroll Theory)

• Most widely accepted and used theory of intelligence.
• Evidence-based theory synthesizing results from standardized intelligence tests.
• Involves factor analysis to identify different factors of intelligence.
• Three strata of intelligence:
  • Stratum 1: Narrow abilities (specific).
  • Stratum 2: Broad abilities (umbrella for narrow abilities; includes fluid and crystallized intelligence).
  • Stratum 3: General ability (umbrella for all abilities).

Key Abilities within Stratum 2

• Fluid intelligence (GF): Ability to cope with novelty, think rapidly and flexibly.
  • Involves problem-solving, adapting to changing environments, and flexible thinking.
• Crystallized intelligence (GC): General knowledge.
  • Knowledge about language, school learning, and general world knowledge.

Detailed Breakdown of CHC Theory

• General intelligence at the top, branching into broad abilities (stratum two, e.g., fluid and crystallized intelligence).
• Fluid intelligence: ability to be flexible and think about things in a different way.
• Crystallized intelligence: book learnings, knowledge.
• Short-term memory: ability to retain things impacts overall intelligence.
• Visual processing: ability to look at things and mentally manipulate them.
• Auditory processing: ability to take information auditorily and manipulate it.
• Long-term storage and retrieval: ability to remember things for a long time and retrieve them when needed.
• Cognitive processing speed: how quickly we are able to do certain tasks.
• Decision and reaction speed: how quickly we react to things, how quickly we can make a decision about things.
• Reading and writing and quantitative knowledge.
• Each of these broad abilities is made up of various narrow abilities that can be tested using cognitive tests.

Fluid and Crystallized Intelligence: Further Breakdown

• Fluid intelligence: induction, general sequential reasoning, and quantitative reasoning.
  • Problem-solving, pattern recognition, ability to think about new information.
  • Induction: observing the world and making suggestions about what we observe as being broader; going from specific to broad.
  • General sequential reasoning: recognizing sequence of shapes or patterns.
  • Mathematical reasoning: can we predict what the answer's going to be?
• Crystallized intelligence: knowledge of general information, language development, and lexical knowledge.
  • General information: pub trivia knowledge.
  • Language development: lexical knowledge, the amount number of words that we know, our ability to listen, our ability to communicate, grammar, and our oral production and fluency
  • Fluid is more of that doing new things, and crystallized is more of that saying what you know, knowing things and saying them.

Pros and Cons of CHC Theory

• Pros:
  • Easy to measure abilities.
  • Quantifiable.
  • Evidence for these as factors and as separate abilities.
• Cons:
  • Focuses on cognitive abilities.
  • Relies on learned knowledge.
  • Can we actually measure those latent cognitive processes?

Gardner's Theory of Multiple Intelligences

• Eight different types of constructs:
  • Linguistic: language production, language understanding.
  • Logical-mathematical: reasoning and maths.
  • Spatial: how objects move in space and relate to each other in space.
  • Bodily-kinesthetic: physically anchored intelligence in the body.
  • Musical: musicians are gonna be higher in this.
  • Naturalistic: our understanding of the natural world.
  • Interpersonal: social and emotional intelligence.
  • Intrapersonal: understanding the self.
• Each of these functions are separate to each other, but where I would suggest that they can and must interact.

Pros and Cons of Gardner's Theory

• Pros:
  • Recognizes different types of skills and intelligence.
  • More cross-culturally relevant.
  • Allows for more variability between people; less standardized and more individualized.
• Cons:
  • Hard to measure any of these constructs.
  • Less evidence for these.
  • Doesn't tackle our working memory or problem-solving.

Models of Intelligence: Innate vs. Developed

• Neither model explains whether intelligence is something we have or something we develop.
• Biological models suggest we either have it or we don't, while sociological models suggest it can be developed over time.
• Some cultures (e.g., First Nations people) believe elders with more knowledge are more intelligent.
• In Western culture, there's an impression that elders know less.
• Is having greater knowledge the same as intelligence?
• Is age the thing that leads to wisdom?
• Is wisdom part of intelligence that we haven't assessed?

Assessment of Intelligence

• Assessing intelligence helps to rule out intellectual disability as the cause of an ongoing issue; identifying people who might need additional support.
• To see if there are other underlying causes of ongoing problems.
• Identify any particular cognitive domains that might be impaired.
• Helps to identify individuals needing additional support (e.g., in schools, for NDIS support).

Methods of Measuring Intelligence

Stanford Binet Intelligence Test

• Traditional IQ test.
• Calculation of a mental age which was divided by the individual's chronological age and that gave us an IQ score

Wechsler Adult Intelligence Scale (WAIS)

• More commonly used IQ test.
• Utilizes a comparative comparison to a normative sample to calculate IQ
• Different domains:
  • Verbal comprehension.
  • Perceptual reasoning.
  • Working memory.
  • Processing speed.

Distribution of Intelligence

• Normal distribution with a mean of 100 and a standard deviation of 15.
• Average intelligence: 85 to 115.
• Lower level intelligence: below 85.
• Higher intelligence: above 115.
• Gifted: above 145.
• Extreme intellectual disability: below 55.

Difficulties with Current Assessments

*Everyone gets the same test regardless of their background and access to resources.

• Expensive process.
  *IQ tests that we use a lot don't assess cognitive strengths and weaknesses of non-Western people.
• May not be fair for people who have never been exposed to those things before; not an accurate depiction of where they're at in this normative distribution.
• Those norms that we talked about before, maybe they only apply to the group they're developed in.
• Culturally based differences in IQ have been used to suggest white supremacy inappropriately.

Intelligence in Pop Culture and Media

• Intelligence tests are often advertised on social media and related to celebrities and politicians.
• Questions to consider:
  • Where does this information come from?
  • Who is telling us this and why?
  • What is the purpose of publicizing this?
  • What does it help us to know?

Psychological and Sociological Impacts of Intelligence Perception

• How does perceiving oneself or being perceived by others as having high or low intelligence affect:
  • Psychology?
  • Social interactions?

Key Takeaways

• Is there a necessity of intelligence testing?
• Why do we still use these tests?
• How can we better incorporate cultural differences into theory and assessment?