Week 3 | Day 1 | PSYA02

Week 3 | Day 1 | PSYA02 (Starting with “intelligence” model)

What Is Intelligence?

  • No physical measures to determine intelligence
  • Originally defined as “the ability to distinguish true or important information from false/unimportant information
  • Formal (and more recent) definitions of intelligence include:
    • The ability to learn or understand, or to deal with new or challenging situations
    • The ability to apply knowledge to manipulate one’s environment
    • The ability to think abstractly as measured by objective criteria
    • The ability to be a general problem solver in a variety of domains

Increased Intelligence Effects

  • Flynn Effect
    • IQ scores have consistently risen around the world
    • Strength of gain is ~3 IQ points per decade
    • If an IQ test from 1940 were given today, the average score would likely be higher than 100
    • Possible reasons:
      • Increased nutrition
      • Increased health
      • Better formal education
        • We’re better trained to think abstractly in school similar to how the IQ test works)
      • Environmental complexity via technology

Early Measures of Intelligence: Galton

  • Originally, the main purpose of measuring intelligence was to predict how an individual would perform in school and the workplace
  • Sir Francis Galton was a psychologist and statistician from the late 1800s
  • Overall, Galton’s theory of intelligence was not well-supported

Early Measures of Intelligence: Galton

  • Galton’s theory resulted in the discovery that intelligence is normally distributed
  • Measures of central tendency
    • Mean: average
    • Median: middle score
    • Mode: most common score

*Normal distribution of scores around a mean of 100

Early Measures of Intelligence: Binet and Simon’s Intelligence Test

  • Alfred Binet & Theodore Simon were hired by the French government in the early 1900s to help them with the development of their educational system
  • Binet & Simon created the first standardized IQ test (Binet-Simon test) using trial and error (1904)
    • Used behavioural measures to create test
      • Puzzles
      • Object naming
      • Counting
      • Tests reflecting three basic abilities:
        • Direction
        • Adaptation
        • Criticism
  • Binet realized intelligence developed with age
  • Binet created scales to reflect age-based differences in abilities
    • Eg. if a 6-years-old child could answer the questions that the average 6-year-old could answer, then the child was assigned a mental age of 6

Metnal age: indicates the set of problems that children of a particular age can perform

Early Measures of Intelligence: The Standford-Binet Test

  • American Researchers: Lewis Terman & David Wechsler
    • Modified the Binet-Simon Test to reflect American culture and language
  • Terman helped create Standford-Binet
    • IQ = x 100
  • Problem: Mental age stagnates, but chronological age does not
    • Makes it look like your IQ is going down when it isn’t
    • Deviation IQ can fix this

Wechsler’s Intelligence Test: Using Deviation IQ

  • Mean score on IQ tests is designed to be 100
  • Standard deviation is designed to be 15
  • IQ scores follow a normal distribution
  • Most popular intelligence in use today
  • Advantages:
    • Unaffected by age of the participant
    • Uses point system with questions grouped by content area
    • Adds performance IQ tests

Performance-Based Measures of Intelligence

  • Performance tests based on WAIS are designed to measure the ability to detect non-obvious patterns