Chapter 9 Blog

Intelligence as Sensory Capacity: Out of Sight, Out of Mind.
--Galton proposed a radical hypothesis: Intelligence is the by-product of sensory capacity. He reasoned that most knowledge first comes through the senses, especially vision and hearing. When experimented, his hypothesis is weakly correlated which falsified his claims.

Intelligences as Abstract Thinking
--Binot and Simon established the first intelligence test, a diagnostic tool designed to measure overall thinking ability. They wanted to find a key variable: Higher mental processes or a measure of. These mental processes include reasoning, understanding and judgement. Modern intelligence tests have followed Binet and Simon's lead.

--Most experts agree that intelligence has something that pertains to abstract thinking, the capacity to understand hypothetical concepts, rather than concepts in the here and now.

Intelligence as General versus Specific Abilities

--General intelligence: that accounted for the overall differences in intellect among people. Labeled g.

--Specific abilities: how well we perform on a given mental task depends not only on our general smarts, but also on our particular skills in narrow domains. Labeled s.

Fluid and Crystallized Intelligence

--Developed by Raymond Cattell and John Horn.

--Fluid intelligence: refers to the capacity to learn new ways of solving problems. We rely on our fluid intelligence the first time we try to solve any new problem that we face. Like operating a new vehicle.

--Crystallized intelligence: refers to the accumulated knowledge of the world we acquire overtime. We rely on our crystallized intelligence to recall and answer questions like, what is the capital of Florida?

--The main difference between Fluid and Crystallized intelligence is that Fluid mainly declines with age as Crystallized stay the same or increase with age.

Multiple Intelligences: Different Ways of Being Smart

--Entirely different domains of intellectual skill.

--This part of the chapter examines an even greater divided depth of how to figure out what intelligence is within someone.

--Triarchic Model

Analytical intelligence: the ability to reason logically.

Practical intelligence: also called tacit intelligence, the ability to solve real world problems, especially those involving other people.

Creative intelligence: also called creativity, our ability to come up with novel and effective answers to questions.

Biological Bases of Intelligence

--Intelligence and reaction time: States that people with higher intelligence are able to react quicker to stimuli than people with a lower intelligence.

--Intelligence and memory: Intelligence also bears an intimate connection to memory capacity. A person with a higher intelligence usually has a much higher memory capacity than a person with lower intelligence.

--The location of intelligence: The prefrontal cortex of the brain is determined to be the main section that intelligence is originated from. That section of the brain is usually the most active when an intelligence test is conducted.

Central theme of Intelligence
--Intelligence is related to efficiency or speed of information processing. Capacity and quickness of thinking is usually what more intelligent people consist of.

After reading this chapter and plotting some main points about finding or determining intelligence. I've concluded that a person with more intelligence can solve problems faster, more efficient, and have higher reliability with getting the right answers. Speed and capacity are two main traits that are advantaged with intellectual people. A person who has a harder time figuring out problems and are slower, are usually determined to have a lower intellect. There are many different types of intelligence tests that try to unify one way to determine intelligence, but it seems as though each time a scientist or researcher tries to create one, it has a few biases and only a specific groups intelligence can be determined with it.