14.2

There are three models of intelligence: psychometric, biological, and contextual

Psychometric: explains intelligence through the use of factor analysis of the result of many different intelligence tests that many different people have completed

Spearman proposed that intelligence was made up of general intelligence, which is made up of a cluster of specific abilities (e.g. verbal and numerical)
This model helps understand the structure of intelligence but they do not provide insight into understanding the process of intelligence
A person who does well in one test will likely do well in the others, indicating that the tests depend on a single underlying ability/intelligence

Biological: explains intelligence through the structure and functioning of the brain

Focuses on studying the brain through two methods: case studies with patients with brain damage, and neuroimaging of patients with either damaged or intact brains

Case Studies
- Using case studies allows an ethical approach to studying specific scenarios that can’t be replicated (e.g. Phineas Gage)
- There has been an observed trend where patients with damaged frontal lobes experience reduced intellectual functioning
Neuroimaging and Brain Structure
- MRI studies have picked up a moderate correlation of 0.4 to 0.51 between IQ scores and brain size, suggesting that someone with a larger brain may be more accustomed to higher intelligence
- One specific study, the brain twins, shows a relationship between brain size, intelligence, and genes. This shows that brain structure is heritable, which explains why identical twins have the strongest heritability coefficients
- Brain size is not only determined by heritability coefficients but also by learning difficult skills can increase the volume
Neuroimaging and Brain Function
- Involves measuring brain activity while participants perform an intelligence test to show that particular areas of the brain are active during particular tasks
- PET scan studies show that there is greater activity in intellectually challenging tasks and less activity in easy tasks and that the brains of people with higher levels of intelligence consumed lower levels of glucose than the less intelligent people

Contextualising: explains intelligence as forming according to the culture of the individual

Takes into account different notions of cleverness, and the effects of the culture in which a child is raised
Two examples of cultural influences are: Indigenous Australians and Street kids in Brazil

Indigenous Australians
- The culture may place value on hunting and fishing skills. whereas the culture of urban Australians may place a larger value on academic performance at school
- Many standard intelligence tests are culturally biased because they are on Western schooling and knowledge paradigms
- Kearin found that Aboriginal adolescents performed lower than non-Indigenous Australians on standard intelligence tests, but outperformed their non-Indigenous counterparts in all conditions of a visual-spatial memory task
Street Kids in Brazil
- Brazilian children born and raised in poverty and with no formal education were highly competent at performing complex arithmetic in relation to selling items in the street
- They were unable to complete formal arithmetic tasks in a school setting

	Created by Summer S 4 months ago

Notes for 14.1: What is Intelligence?