Skip to main content Accessibility help

We use cookies to distinguish you from other users and to provide you with a better experience on our websites. Close this message to accept cookies or find out how to manage your cookie settings.

Close cookie message
×
Hostname: page-component-586b7cd67f-vdxz6 Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-11-20T17:55:22.810Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false

4 - An Alternative View on the Measurement of Intelligence and Its History

from Part I - Intelligence and Its Measurement

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  13 December 2019

By
Paul De Boeck ,
Laurence Robert Gore ,
Trinidad González  and
Ernesto San Martín
Edited by
Robert J. Sternberg
Robert J. Sternberg
Affiliation:
Cornell University, New York
Get access

Summary

IQ as a measure of intelligence is at the same time a success and a failure: a success because of the predictive value of IQ, and a failure because we do not know precisely what it is measuring. Intelligence has been defined in many ways. To discuss the definitional issue, we rely on Aristotle and his four ways to define something: explaining what it looks like, what it consists of, where it comes from, and what it is for. In this chapter we present an alternative view on how the measurement of intelligence has evolved and how it relates to different views on what intelligence is. The first initiatives to measure intelligence were inspired by physics and a strictly quantitative approach. These initiatives were based on the notion of general intelligence as mental energy, and led to tests to measure intelligence such as reaction times and perceptual discrimination (i.e., what intelligence looks like). IQ as a quantification of intelligence is from a later date and is based on a quite different type of test, inspired by an interest in what intelligence is for, as expressed in the work of some of the most famous intelligence test developers (e.g., Binet, Terman, Wechsler). The type of content of these tests is preserved in most intelligence tests today, mainly because of the predictive success of IQ tests. There now is also agreement that intelligence is not unitary but multidimensional. Robert Sternberg’s major endeavor to unravel processes has shown that there is no clear-cut answer to the question of what intelligence consists of in terms of cognitive processes or how processes can be measured. Other endeavors have resulted in measurement of genetic and environmental influences, in a revival of reaction time and discrimination measures, and in hypotheses about biological mechanics, such as mitochondrial efficiency. We conclude that intelligence is still a vague concept without much hope that it will be clarified soon, even though its measurement through a variety of cognitive tasks seems to work well from a predictive point of view.

Keywords

measurementhistoryIQdefinitional issues
Type
Chapter
Information
The Cambridge Handbook of Intelligence , pp. 47 - 74
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Print publication year: 2020

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

References

Agnoli, P., & D’Agostini, G. (2005). Why does the meter beat the second? https://arxiv.org/abs/physics/0412078Google Scholar
Aquinas, Thomas (1961). Commentary on Aristotle’s Metaphysics (trans. John P. Rowan). Notre Dame, IN: Dumb Ox.Google Scholar
Barnes, B., & Sternberg, R. J. (1989). Social intelligence and decoding of nonverbal cues. Intelligence, 13, 263–282.Google Scholar
Barrett, P. T., Petrides, K. V., & Eysenck, H. J. (1998). Estimating inspection time: Response probabilities, the BRAT IT algorithm, and IQ correlations. Personality and Individual Differences, 24, 405–419.Google Scholar
Binet, A., & Simon, T. (1905). Méthodes nouvelles pour le diagnostic du niveaux intellectuel des anormaux. L’Année Psychologique, 11, 191–244.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Binet, A., & Simon, T. (1908). Le développement de l’intelligence chez les enfants. L’Année Psychologique, 14, 1–95.Google Scholar
Black, E. (2003). War against the weak: Eugenics and America’s campaign to create a master race. New York: Four Walls Eight Windows.Google Scholar
Burt, C. (1949). The structure of the mind: A review of the results of factor analysis. British Journal of Educational Psychology, 19, 100–111, 176–199.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Carroll, J. B. (1993). Human cognitive abilities. New York: Cambridge University Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Cattell, J. M. (1890). Mental tests and measurements. Mind, 15, 373–380.Google Scholar
Cattell, R. B. (1963). Theory of fluid and crystallized intelligence: A critical experiment. Journal of Educational Psychology, 54, 1–22.Google Scholar
Cianciolo, A. T., & Sternberg, R. J. (2004). Intelligence: A brief history. Malden, MA: Blackwell.Google Scholar
De Boeck, P. (2013). Intelligence, where to look, where to go? Journal of Intelligence, 1, 5–24.Google Scholar
Deary, I. J., Penke, L., & Johnson, W. (2010). The neuroscience of human intelligence differences. Nature Review Neuroscience, 11, 201–211.Google Scholar
Doehring, D. G., Reitan, R. M., & Kløve, H. (1961). Changes in patterns of intelligence test performance associated with homonymous visual field defects. Journal of Nervous and Mental Disease, 123, 227–233.Google Scholar
Engle, R. W., Tuholski, S. W., Laughlin, J. E., & Conway, A. R. A. (1999). Working memory, short-term memory, and general fluid intelligence: A latent variable approach. Journal of Experimental Psychology: General, 128, 309–331.Google Scholar
Eysenck, H. (1967). Intelligence assessment: A theoretical and experimental approach. British Journal of Educational Psychology, 37, 81–98.Google Scholar
Eysenck, H. J. (1982). A model for intelligence. Berlin: Springer-Verlag.Google Scholar
Eysenck, H. J. (1988). The biological basis of intelligence. In Irvine, S. H. & Berry, J. W. (Eds.), Human abilities in cultural context. New York: Cambridge University Press.Google Scholar
Fechner, G. T. (1860). Elemente der Psychophysik. Leipzig: Breitkopf und Härtel.Google Scholar
Feldman Barrett, L. (2017). How emotions are made. The secret life of the brain. Boston: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt.Google Scholar
Galton, F. (1883). Inquiry into the human faculty and its development. London: MacMillan.Google Scholar
Gardner, H. (1983). Frames of mind: The theory of multiple intelligence. New York: Basic Books.Google Scholar
Geary, D. C. (2018). Efficiency of mitochondrial functioning as the fundamental biological mechanism of general intelligence. Psychological Review, 125, 1028–1050.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Giacomo, P. (1984). News from the BIPM. Metrologia, 20, 25–30.Google Scholar
Goleman, D. (1995). Emotional intelligence. New York: Bantam Books.Google Scholar
Goleman, D. (2006). Social intelligence: The new science of human relationships. New York: Bantam Books.Google Scholar
Gottfredson, L. S. (1997). Mainstream science on intelligence: An editorial with 52 signatories, history, and bibliography. Intelligence, 24, 13–23.Google Scholar
Guilford, J. P. (1956). The structure of intellect. Psychological Bulletin, 53, 267–293.Google Scholar
Gustaffson, J. (1984). A unifying model for the structure of human intellectual abilities. Intelligence, 8, 179–203.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Holzinger, K. J., & Swineford, F. (1937). The bi-factor method. Psychometrika, 2, 41–52.Google Scholar
Horn, J. L. (1968). Organization of abilities and the development of intelligence. Psychological Review, 75, 242–259.Google Scholar
Horn, J. L., & Cattell, R. B. (1966). Refinement and test of the theory of fluid and crystalized generalized intelligences. Journal of Educational Psychology, 57, 253–270.Google Scholar
Horn, J. L., & Knapp, J. R. (1973). On the subjective character of the empirical base of Guilford’s structure-of-intellect model. Psychological Bulletin, 80, 33–43.Google Scholar
Hunt, E., Frost, N., & Lunneborg, C. (1973). Individual differences in cognition: A new approach to cognition. In Bower, G. (Ed.), The psychology of learning and motivation: Advances in research and theory (vol.7, pp. 87–122). New York: Academic Press.Google Scholar
Hunt, E., & Jaeggi, S. M. (2013). Challenges for research on intelligence. Journal of Intelligence, 1, 36–54.Google Scholar
Hunt, E., Lunneborg, C., & Lewis, J. (1975). What does it mean to be high verbal? Cognitive Psychology, 7, 194–227.Google Scholar
Intelligence and Its Measurement: A Symposium. (1921). Journal of Educational Psychology, 12, 123–147.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Jensen, A. R. (1982). The chronometry of intelligence. In Sternberg, R. (Ed.), Advances in the psychology of human intelligence (vol.1, pp. 255–310). Hillsdale, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum.Google Scholar
Johnson, W., & Bouchard, T. J. (2005). The structure of human intelligence: It is verbal, perceptual, and image rotation (VPR), not fluid and crystallized. Intelligence, 33, 393–416.Google Scholar
Kaufman, A. S., Raiford, S. E., & Coalson, D. L. (2016). Intelligent testing with the WISC-V. Hoboken, NJ: Wiley.Google Scholar
Kell, H. J., & Lang, J. W. B. (2017). Specific abilities in the workplace: More important than g? Journal of Intelligence, 5, 13. https://doi.org/10.3390/jintelligence5020013Google Scholar
Kovacs, K., & Conway, A. R. A. (2016). Process overlap theory: A unified account of the general factor of intelligence. Psychological Inquiry, 27, 151–177.Google Scholar
Kyllonen, P. C., & Christal, R. E. (1990). Reasoning ability is (little more than) working-memory capacity?! Intelligence, 14, 389–433.Google Scholar
Legg, S., & Hutter, M. (2007). A collection of definitions of intelligence. Technical report. www.researchgate.net/publication/1895883Google Scholar
Lezak, M. D., Howieson, D. B., & Loring, D. W. (2004). Neuropsychological assessment (4th ed.). New York: Oxford University Press.Google Scholar
Lichtenberger, O., & Kaufman, A. S. (2009). Essentials of WAIS-IV assessment. New York: Wiley.Google Scholar
Mayer, J. D., & Salovey, P. (1993). The intelligence of emotional intelligence. Intelligence, 17, 433–442.Google Scholar
McGrew, K. S. (2009). CHC theory and the human cognitive abilities project: Standing on the shoulders of the giants of psychometric intelligence research. Intelligence, 37, 1–10.Google Scholar
Melnick, M. D., Harrison, B. R., Park, S., Benneto, L., & Tadin, D. (2013). A strong interactive link between sensory discriminations and intelligence. Current Biology, 23, 1013–1017.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Neisser, U., Boodoo, G., Bouchard, T. J. Jr., Boykin, A. W., Brody, N., Ceci, S. J., et al. (1996). Intelligence: Knowns and unknowns. American Psychologist, 51, 77–101.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Plomin, R., & von Stumm, S. (2018). The new genetics of intelligence. Nature Review Genetics, 19, 148–159.Google Scholar
Rapaport, D., Gill, M., & Schafer, R. (1945). Diagnostic psychological testing, vol. 1.Chicago: The Year Book Publishers.Google Scholar
Rapaport, D., Gill, M., & Schafer, R. (1946). Diagnostic psychological testing, vol. 2. Chicago: The Year Book Publishers.Google Scholar
Rasch, G. (1960). Probabilistic models for some intelligence and attainment tests. Copenhagen, Denmark: Danish Institute for Educational Research.Google Scholar
Ratcliff, R., Thapar, A., & McKoon, G. (2010). Individual differences, ageing, and IQ in two-choice tasks. Cognitive Psychology, 60, 127–157.Google Scholar
Raven, J. C. (1938). Progressive matrices: A perceptual test of intelligence. London: Lewis.Google Scholar
Roid, G. H. (2003). Stanford-Binet Intelligence Scales, Fifth Edition. Itasca, IL: Riverside Publishing.Google Scholar
Roid, G. H., & Tippin, S. M. (2009). Assessment of intellectual strengths and weaknesses with the Stanford-Binet Intelligence Scales – Fifth Edition (SB5). In Naglieri, J. A. & Goldstein, S. (Eds.), Practitioner’s guide to assessing intelligence and achievement. Hoboken, NJ: John Wiley & Sons.Google Scholar
Santarnecchi, E., Emmendorfer, A., Tadayon, S., Rossi, S., Rossi, A., & Pascual-Leone, A. (2017). Network connectivity correlates of variability in fluid intelligence performance. Intelligence, 65, 35–47.Google Scholar
Schmiedek, F., Oberauer, K., Wilhelm, O., Süß, H. M., & Wittmann, W. W. (2007). Individual differences in components of reaction time distributions and their relations to working memory and intelligence. Journal of Experimental Psychology: General, 136, 414–429.Google Scholar
Sheppard, L. D., & Vernon, P. A. (2008). Intelligence and speed of information-processing: A review of 50 years of research. Intelligence, 44, 535–551.Google Scholar
Spearman, C. (1904a). General intelligence, objectively determined and measured. American Journal of Psychology, 15, 201–295.Google Scholar
Spearman, C. (1904b). The proof and measurement of association between two things. American Journal of Psychology, 15, 72–101.Google Scholar
Spearman, C. (1923). The nature of ‘‘intelligence’’ and the principles of cognition. London: Macmillan.Google Scholar
Spearman, C. (1927). The abilities of man. London: Macmillan.Google Scholar
Stern, W. (1912). Die psychologischen Methoden der Intelligenzprüfung und deren Anwendung an Schulkindern. Leipzig: Barth.Google Scholar
Sternberg, R. J. (1977a). Intelligence, information processing, and analogical reasoning: The componential analysis of human abilities. Hillsdale, NJ: Erlbaum.Google Scholar
Sternberg, R. J. (1977b). Component processes in analogical reasoning. Psychological Review, 84, 353–378.Google Scholar
Sternberg, R. J. (1981). Intelligence and non-entrenchment. Journal of Educational Psychology, 73, 1–16.Google Scholar
Sternberg, R. J. (1983). Components of human intelligence. Cognition, 15, 1–48.Google Scholar
Sternberg, R. J. (1985). Beyond IQ. New York: Cambridge University Press.Google Scholar
Sternberg, R. J. (1997). Successful intelligence. New York: Plume.Google Scholar
Sternberg, R. J. (2003). Wisdom, intelligence, and creativity synthesized. New York: Cambridge University Press.Google Scholar
Sternberg, R. J. (2010). College admissions for the 21st century. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.Google Scholar
Sternberg, R. J. (2018). Successful intelligence in theory, research, and practice. In Sternberg, R. J. (Ed.), The nature of intelligence (pp. 308–322). New York: Cambridge University Press.Google Scholar
Sternberg, R. J., Castejón, J. L., Prieto, M. D., Hautamäki, J., & Grigorenko, E. (2001). Confirmatory factor analysis of the Sternberg Triarchic Abilities Test (multiple-choice items) in three international samples: An empirical test of the triarchic theory of intelligence. European Journal of Psychological Assessment, 17, 1−16.Google Scholar
Sternberg, R. J., & Detterman, D. K. (Eds.) (1986). What is intelligence? Norwood, NJ: Ablex.Google Scholar
Sternberg, R. J., Forsythe, G. B., Hedlund, J., Horvath, J. A., Wagner, R. K., Williams, W. M., et al. (2000). Practical intelligence in everyday life. Cambridge, MA: Cambridge University Press.Google Scholar
Terman, L. M. (1916). The measurement of intelligence. Boston: Houghton Mifflin.Google Scholar
Thomson, G. H. (1916). A hierarchy without a general factor. British Journal of Psychology, 8, 271–281.Google Scholar
Thorndike, E. L. (1921). Intelligence and its measurement: A symposium – I. Journal of Educational Psychology, 12, 124–127.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Thurstone, L. L. (1924). The nature of intelligence. London: Kegan Paul, Trench Trubner & Co.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Thurstone, L. L. (1938). Primary mental abilities. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.Google Scholar
Todd, J., Coolidge, F., & Satz, P. (1977). The Wechsler Adult Intelligence Scale Discrepancy Index: A neuropsychological evaluation. Journal of Consulting and Clinical Psychology, 45, 450–454.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Vernon, P. E. (1950). The structure of human abilities. London: Methuen.Google Scholar
Wagner, R. K., & Sternberg, R. J. (1986). Tacit knowledge and intelligence in the everyday world. In Sternberg, R. J. & Wagner, R. K. (Eds.), Practical intelligence: Nature and origins of competence in the everyday world (pp. 51–83). Cambridge, MA: Cambridge University Press.Google Scholar
Wechsler, D. (1944). The measurement of adult intelligence (3rd ed.). Baltimore, MD: Williams & Wilkins.Google Scholar
Wechsler, D. (1975). Intelligence defined and undefined: A relativistic appraisal. American Psychologist, 30, 135–139.Google Scholar
Wechsler, D. (2008). Wechsler Adult Intelligence Scale – Fourth Edition. San Antonio, TX: Pearson.Google Scholar
Wechsler, D. (2012). Wechsler Preschool and Primary Scale of Intelligence™ – Fourth Edition. San Antonio, TX: Pearson.Google Scholar
Wechsler, D. (2014). Wechsler Intelligence Scale for Children® – Fifth Edition. San Antonio, TX: Pearson.Google Scholar
Whitely, S. E. (1976). Solving verbal analogies: Some cognitive components of intelligence test items. Journal of Educational Psychology, 68, 234–242.Google Scholar
Whitely, S. E. (1977). Information processing on intelligence test items: Some response components. Applied Psychological Measurement, 1, 465–476.Google Scholar
Wissler, C. (1901). The correlation of mental and physical tests. Psychological Review, Monograph Supplement, 3 (6).Google Scholar
Wundt, W. (1902). Grundriss der Psychologie. Leipzig: Engelmann.Google Scholar
Yerkes, R. M. (1921). Psychological examining in the US Army. Memoirs of the National Academy of Sciences, vol. 15. Washington: US Government Printing Office.Google Scholar

Save book to Kindle

To save this book to your Kindle, first ensure coreplatform@cambridge.org is added to your Approved Personal Document E-mail List under your Personal Document Settings on the Manage Your Content and Devices page of your Amazon account. Then enter the ‘name’ part of your Kindle email address below. Find out more about saving to your Kindle.

Note you can select to save to either the @free.kindle.com or @kindle.com variations. ‘@free.kindle.com’ emails are free but can only be saved to your device when it is connected to wi-fi. ‘@kindle.com’ emails can be delivered even when you are not connected to wi-fi, but note that service fees apply.

Find out more about the Kindle Personal Document Service.

Available formats
×

Save book to Dropbox

To save content items to your account, please confirm that you agree to abide by our usage policies. If this is the first time you use this feature, you will be asked to authorise Cambridge Core to connect with your account. Find out more about saving content to Dropbox.

Available formats
×

Save book to Google Drive

To save content items to your account, please confirm that you agree to abide by our usage policies. If this is the first time you use this feature, you will be asked to authorise Cambridge Core to connect with your account. Find out more about saving content to Google Drive.

Available formats
×