Intelligence

• Operational definition


  How you take an abstract concept and turn it quantifiable
• Reductionism


  Flaw with intelligence testing, where a person's intelligence cannot be just a number
• Psychometrics


  Means "measuring the mind"
• Speed of processing


  How fast a person can come up with a correct answer. Easily measured and tends to be correlated with intelligence
• Fluid intelligence


  Related to speed of processing and the ability of a brain to remember and organize a lot of information very quickly
• Crystallized intelligence


  Related to heuristics. As we age, information processing gets slower, but older people use information they already have to solve problems
• Flynn effect


  Over a generation, the average IQ rises, so the mean score has to be recalibrated. So if, as an average person (lmao imagine) taking an older IQ test you'd have a higher score
• Savant syndrome


  Genius like ability in a very narrow area, like being able to say the day of the week for any date. Associated with autism but the venn isn't a circle
• Stereotype threat


  Members of a group that are thought to be "less than" in certain areas will often perform worse in those areas than members of a different group
• Single blind intelligence testing is the way to avoid stereotype threat away, taking away the stress of being measured. If you don't remind them that it's a test or of their group membership, disparities disappear
• Francis Galton (1822-1911)


  Psychologist who was the first one to think that intelligence could be quantified. He tried to correlate reaction time with intelligence but couldn't. Darwin's cousin. Proponent of eugenics who believed that rich "smart" people should reproduce more
• Alfred Binet (1857-1911)


  First psychologist to come up with a test to quantify mental abilities. Took average of a bunch of test scores of people of each age and compared them so you could find out where you were in regards to where you "should be"
• Mental age


  At what level a child is operating, so can you do what an 8 year old can do? What about a 10 year old? Not how old you are but correlated obv
• Chronological age


  Actual age of a person
• Mental age / chronological age x 100 = intelligence quotient
• Lewis Terman (1877-1956)


  Took Binet's IQ test and reconfigured it for the American population. Because he worked at Stanford, it became known as the Stanford-Binet test
• David Welscher (1896-1981)


  Psychologist who made a new intelligence test not based on an age system. Valued nonverbal performance like spatial awareness and pattern work, so ESL people could still do well
• Howard Gardner (1948-)


  Psychologist who believed that intelligence was not one thing and could not be reduced to one number, so came up with types of intelligence
• Howard Gardner's types of intelligence

  • Linguistic (written or verbal communication)
  • Logical (abstract concepts like if/then)
  • Musical (aptitude for playing and thinking in music)
  • Spatial (where things are)
  • Kinaesthetic (knowing how your body is moving, proprioception)
  • Intrapersonal (knowing your own thoughts and feelings)
  • Interpersonal (reading other people)
  • Naturalist (understand the connectedness of nature)
• Charles Spearman (1864 - 1945)


  Psychologist who believed that people actually do only have one form of general mental ability which he called G, and specific abilities which he called s. Used factor analysis for both, so two-factor theory
• Factor analysis


  When factors that are similar and occur together can be grouped into one thing
• Two factor theory


  Spearman theory of intelligence that grouped intelligence into general and specific
• Robert Sternberg (1949-)


  Psychologist who came up with the triarchic theory of intelligence which realized that intelligence doesn't exist in a test, so tried to capture how people interact with their environment (practical, experiential, analytical)
• 3 traits of an intelligence test:

  • Standardization (against what is an individual score compared)
  • Reliability (is the score stable over time)
  • Validity (does the test measure what it says it measures)
• Standardization starts with many sample pretests, which are given before it can be administered as an actual test. From those, we can see the number of questions that people get right, and that is a frame of reference to create the bell curve
• Reliability of an intelligence test makes sure that the retest values are the same (unmemorizable but same difficulty level), and that they don't change much with age or mood of an individual. Can use split in half method
• Split in half method


  Checking a test's reliability by seeing if number of correct answers skews towards any part of it
• Validity in intelligence tests can be measured what it was intended to measure. Comes in construct, content, criterion, and predictive
• Content validity


  Has to measure everything. AP psych test that only tested neural activity would have low this
• Construct validity


  The operalizationalism of a test, like how a concept as nebulous as intelligence can be measured on a test
• Criterion validity


  If a test correlates to an outside measure, so like if someone is actually smart in real life
• Predictive validity


  How well a test predicts future performance. Only works for large sets of data, and does not reflect individual cases, only trends