Basic psychology: Intelligence

 Contents

Intelligence has been defined in a variety of ways, including the ability to abstract, logic, understand, self-awareness, learn, emotional knowledge, reason, plan, be creative, think critically, and solve problems. It can be defined more broadly as the ability to perceive or infer information and retain it as knowledge to be applied to adaptive behaviours within an environment or context.

Etymology

The term intelligence comes from the Latin nouns intelligentia or intellctus, which come from the verb intelligere, which means "to comprehend or perceive." In the Middle Ages, intellectus became a scholarly technical term for understanding, as well as a translation of the Greek philosophical term nous. This term, however, was strongly associated with teleological scholasticism's metaphysical and cosmological theories, including theories of soul immortality and the concept of the active intellect (also known as the active intelligence). This approach to nature study was strongly opposed by early modern philosophers such as Francis Bacon, Thomas Hobbes, John Locke, and David Hume, who all preferred "understanding" (rather than "intellectus" or "intelligence") in their English philosophical works. Hobbes, for example, used "intellectus intelligit," translated in the English version as "the understanding understandeth," as an example of a logical absurdity in his Latin De Corpore. As a result, the term "intelligence" has become less common in English-language philosophy, but it has later been adopted (with the scholastic theories that it now implies) in more contemporary psychology.

Definitions

The definition of intelligence is debatable, with differing views on what it entails and whether it is quantifiable. Some psychologists have proposed the following definitions:

• From "Mainstream Science on Intelligence," a Wall Street Journal op-ed statement signed by fifty-two researchers (out of a total of 131 invited to sign):

A very general mental capability that, among other things, involves the ability to reason, plan, solve problems, think abstractly, comprehend complex ideas, learn quickly and learn from experience. It is not merely book learning, a narrow academic skill, or test-taking smarts. Rather, it reflects a broader and deeper capability for comprehending our surroundings—"catching on," "making sense" of things, or "figuring out" what to do.

• From Intelligence: Knowns and Unknowns (1995), a report published by the American Psychological Association's Board of Scientific Affairs:

Individuals differ from one another in their ability to understand complex ideas, to adapt effectively to the environment, to learn from experience, to engage in various forms of reasoning, to overcome obstacles by taking thought. Although these individual differences can be substantial, they are never entirely consistent: a given person's intellectual performance will vary on different occasions, in different domains, as judged by different criteria. Concepts of "intelligence" are attempts to clarify and organize this complex set of phenomena. Although considerable clarity has been achieved in some areas, no such conceptualization has yet answered all the important questions, and none commands universal assent. Indeed, when two dozen prominent theorists were recently asked to define intelligence, they gave two dozen, somewhat different, definitions.

• David Wechsler 

The aggregate or global capacity of the individual to act purposefully, to think rationally, and to deal effectively with his environment

• Lloyd Humphreys 

the resultant of the process of acquiring, storing in memory, retrieving, combining, comparing, and using in new contexts information and conceptual skills".

• Howard Gardner 

To my mind, a human intellectual competence must entail a set of skills of problem solving — enabling the individual to resolve genuine problems or difficulties that he or she encounters and, when appropriate, to create an effective product — and must also entail the potential for finding or creating problems — and thereby laying the groundwork for the acquisition of new knowledge. 

Human intelligence

Human intelligence is defined as human intellectual power, which is characterised by complex cognitive feats as well as high levels of motivation and self-awareness. Human intelligence allows us to remember descriptions of things and apply those descriptions to our future actions. It is a mental process. It provides humans with the cognitive abilities to learn, form concepts, understand, and reason, as well as the abilities to recognise patterns, innovate, plan, solve problems, and communicate using language. Humans can experience and think because they have intelligence. 

Intelligence is not the same as learning. Learning is the act of retaining facts, information, or abilities and being able to recall them for future use, whereas intelligence is a person's cognitive ability to perform these and other processes. Various attempts have been made to quantify intelligence through testing, such as the Intelligence Quotient (IQ) test. Many people, however, question the validity of IQ tests, claiming that they cannot accurately measure intelligence.

Emotional intelligence

Emotional intelligence is defined as the ability to convey emotion to others in an understandable manner as well as accurately read the emotions of others. Some theories suggest that, in addition to accuracy, increased emotional intelligence could lead to faster emotion generation and processing.  Furthermore, higher emotional intelligence is thought to aid in the management of emotions, which is beneficial to our problem-solving abilities. Emotional intelligence is essential for our mental health and is related to social intelligence.

Social intelligence

The ability to understand the social cues and motivations of others and oneself in social situations is referred to as social intelligence. It is thought to be distinct from other types of intelligence, but it shares similarities with emotional intelligence. Other studies have coincided with social intelligence, focusing on how we make judgments of others, the accuracy with which we do so, and why people are viewed as having positive or negative social character. There is some disagreement about whether these studies and social intelligence are based on the same theories or if there is a distinction between them, and they are generally thought to be from two different schools of thought.

The concepts of "book smarts" and "street smarts" are opposing viewpoints based on the premise that some people have knowledge gained through academic study but lack the experience to apply that knowledge sensibly, whereas others have knowledge gained through practical experience but lack accurate information usually gained through study to effectively apply that knowledge. Hector Levesque, an artificial intelligence researcher, has observed:

Given the importance of learning through text in our own personal lives and in our culture, it is perhaps surprising how utterly dismissive we tend to be of it. It is sometimes derided as being merely "book knowledge," and having it is being "book smart." In contrast, knowledge acquired through direct experience and apprenticeship is called "street knowledge," and having it is being "street smart".

Nonhuman animal intelligence

Despite the fact that humans have been the primary focus of intelligence researchers, scientists have also attempted to investigate animal intelligence, or more broadly, animal cognition. These researchers are interested in studying mental ability in a specific species as well as comparing abilities across species. They investigate various problem-solving measures, as well as numerical and verbal reasoning abilities. Some challenges in this area include defining intelligence in such a way that it has the same meaning across species (for example, comparing intelligence between literate humans and illiterate animals), as well as operationalizing a measure that accurately compares mental ability across different species and contexts. 

Wolfgang Köhler's research on ape intelligence is an example of this type of study. The Intelligence of Dogs by Stanley Coren is a notable book on the subject of dog intelligence. Chimpanzees, bonobos (particularly the language-using Kanzi) and other great apes, dolphins, elephants, and, to a lesser extent, parrots, rats, and ravens are among the non-human animals that have been noted and studied for their intelligence.

g factor in non-humans 

Non-human animals have shown evidence of a general intelligence factor. The general factor of intelligence, abbreviated as the g factor, is a psychometric construct that summarises the correlations observed between an individual's scores on a variety of cognitive abilities. The g factor was first discovered in humans, but it has since been discovered in a variety of non-human species.

Plant intelligence

Plants have been argued to be intelligent because of their ability to sense and model external and internal environments, and then adjust their morphology, physiology, and phenotype accordingly to ensure self-preservation and reproduction.

One counter-argument is that intelligence is widely understood to involve the creation and use of persistent memories, as opposed to computation, which does not involve learning. If this is accepted as the final definition of intelligence, it includes the artificial intelligence of robots capable of "machine learning," but excludes the purely autonomic sense-reaction responses seen in many plants. Plants are not limited to automated sensory-motor responses; they can distinguish between positive and negative experiences and "learn" (register memories) from their past experiences. They can also communicate, accurately compute their circumstances, use sophisticated cost–benefit analysis, and take tightly controlled actions to mitigate and control the various environmental stressors.