Intelligence in early childhood

Question 1

what is the First standardized test of intelligence?

Answer 1

• Looking for a “practical, convenient and rapid” technique to identify children at a primary age whose lack of success or ability might lead them to require special education
• 50 children aged 3-10 tested on 30 short tasks related to everyday life:
  
  • counting coins, naming objects in a picture, word definitions
• From less to more complex to determine a child’s ‘mental age’
• Binet-Simon scale, published in 1911

Question 2

what is the Stanford-Binet test?

Answer 2

• Based on 1000 children aged 4-14 – much wider range to determine the ‘mental age’
• Adapted and revised the original test:
  
  • e.g., compare two horizontal lines and say which is longer, copy a square, find a shape that matches a target shape (at 4 y.o.);
  • show awareness of dates, arrange weights from highest to lowest, do mental arithmetic (at 9 y.o.)

Question 3

What is an IQ?

Answer 3

• Wechsler: Standardization based on normal distribution curve rather than mental/chronological age, individual’s scores relative to average scores:
  
  • Mental age = actual test score
  • Chronological age = expected score
• Ratio: ‘mental age’ varies proportionally to the real age, e.g., if a 6 y.o. has a mental age of 5, when they are 10 y.o., they will have a mental age of 8
• Emphasized the need to get large and representative samples to develop age ‘norms’
• Developed by William Stern in 1912, based on Binet’s intelligence test

Question 4

what is General intelligence (g)?

Answer 4

• Different way of conceptualizing intelligence – theoretical, not applied
• Spearman, 1904 - factor analysis
• Discovered positive correlations between various intelligence tests
• Also created a Spearman’s correlation - statistical test!
• Two-factor theory of intelligence:
  
  • specific (math, verbal, spatial, etc) vs
  • general (‘g’) – fundamental mechanism allowing to see relationships between objects, events and information and draw inferences from those relationships

Question 5

what are the Mullen Scales of Early Learning as measure of g?

Answer 5

• 5 subscales: (a) gross motor, (b) fine motor, (c) visual reception (or nonverbal problem solving), (d) receptive language, and (e) expressive language.
• Measure of cognitive functioning for infants and preschool-age children from birth through 68 months
• Provides a composite score that is referred to as an estimate of overall intelligence but also emphasizes
  distinct scales to not lump them all into one score.

Question 6

what is Bayley’s Scales of Infant Development?

Answer 6

• Longitudinal Berkeley Growth Study: from 1928 for 36 years
• Age range 1 month – 3.5 years
• Five scales: child cognitive, motor and language interaction, and parental report of the child’s social–emotional and adaptive behaviour
• DQ – developmental quotients are calculated for each scale
• Only two scales correlated with later IQ and not consistently – suggesting discontinuity in intelligence

Question 7

what is the link between Prenatal maternal stress and child IQ?

Answer 7

• 5-year-old children exposed in utero to high levels of objective stress had lower IQ and language abilities compared to children exposed to low or moderate levels of objective prenatal maternal stress
• Measures of IQ:
  
  • Wechsler Preschool and Primary Scale of Intelligence-Revised (WPPSI-R)
  • Peabody Picture Vocabulary Test-Revised (PPVT-R)

Question 8

what are the Standardized measures of intelligence in older children?

Answer 8

• Wechsler Intelligence Scale for Children:
  
  • Verbal and nonverbal measures:
  • verbal fluency, picture completion, block design, memory span, etc.
• Peabody Picture Vocabulary Test – a measure of verbal ability, quickly evaluate receptive vocabulary without requiring reading or writing

Question 9

Infants’ cognitive development and intelligence?

Answer 9

• Basic cognitive abilities, however defined, underly
  intelligent functioning
• Links between measures of early learning, memory,
  perception and attention and later intelligence
• Is there continuity – do both reflect basic information-processing capacity of an individual?

Question 10

what are the Theoretical approaches to intelligence?

Answer 10

• Piaget’s approach:
  
  • emphasized differences in kinds of thinking children use to solve problems according to stages
• Psychometric approach:
  
  • focuses on analyses within and among specific standardized intelligence tests to predict future performance
• Information-processing approach:
  
  • focuses on cognitive mechanism, emphasizes information processing abilities: to take in, process and store information

Question 11

what is Habituation paradigm as a test?

Answer 11

• Stimulus is presented repeatedly until the infant’s attention decreases significantly.
• Then a novel stimulus is presented and the increase in attention is measured.
• If they look longer at the new stimulus, we assume that they can distinguish between the two objects.

Question 12

what is the Speed of habituation?

Answer 12

• A baby who is quick to habituate to a stimulus might be relatively fast at processing information, thus capable of learning that something is familiar in only a few trials = “short lookers”
• A baby may take longer to habituate to the same
  stimulus, requiring more trials to accurately and
  completely encode a stimulus in memory =
  “long lookers”

Question 13

what is the Visual novelty preference?

Answer 13

• Visual recognition memory requires to encode a stimulus, recognize it as familiar, and recognize an alternative stimulus as novel
• 7-mo-olds: Looking preference for a novel visual stimulus (a face) over a different face which was already familiar (Fagan, 1984)
• Measure: time spent looking at novel image

Question 14

what is the Continuity between early habituation measures and later IQ?

Answer 14

• Preterm infants who continued to fixate an unchanging stimulus for protracted periods of time were less intellectually able in childhood.
• Neonate measure of total fixation time on unchanging stimulus predicted IQ at 8 and 12 years; measures at 4 months did not add to the associations.

Question 15

what is the Predictive power of information processing measures?

Answer 15

• Meta-analysis: speed of habituation and novelty preference related to later intelligence r = .44 at 2-3 years and .56 at 6-year follow-up
• Infants who spent a long time to process an unchanging stimulus (inefficient processing) as neonates had lower IQ later in life

Question 16

what is the The Flynn effect?

Answer 16

• IQ scores increase across time in developed countries at a startlingly consistent rate of approx. 0.33 points per year, or 3.3 points per decade (Flynn, 1984, 1987).
• Confounding of generational effects with changes in test content
• Increased schooling, greater educational attainment of parents, better nutrition, and less childhood disease
• Evidence of environmental factors on IQ

Question 17

what are the Psychometric IQ tests: controversies?

Answer 17

• PROS:
  
  • standardized, normed, valid, reliable
  • good predictive validity of later achievements
• CONS:
  
  • underestimate children who are ill, tired, bored
  • timing is an issue as speed of processing is taken as measure of intelligence (what about those who work slowly and deliberately?)
  • do not directly measure ability – instead, infer intelligence from what children already know (static nature of tests)
  • hard to design culture-free and culture-fair tests

Question 18

what is the Dynamic test of intelligence?

Answer 18

• Based on Vygotsky’s theory: part of what it means to be intelligent includes ability to learn via scaffolded interactions
• Potential rather than present achievement – what is the child READY to learn?
• Dynamic, constructive nature of intelligence - learning process rather than products of past learning
• Contains items up to 2 years above a child’s current level of competence
• Examiners help the child when necessary by asking leading questions, giving examples of demonstrations offering feedback

Question 19

Is intelligence malleable?

Answer 19

• “Process” view of intelligence instead of “Product”
• Genetic and environmental interactions
• Socio-economic status, e.g., parental education, modifies heritability estimates of IQ (Turkheimer et al., 2003): twin studies in US, IQs of children from low SES families were primarily influenced by environment, while IQs of affluent families’ children largely determined by genetics.
• But infants’ cognitive information-processing abilities do not seem to differ based on SES (Smith et al., 2002)
• Does cognitive training work? – No sufficient evidence so far

Question 20

Does (playing) music make children more intelligent?

Answer 20

• Random assignment to keyboard music lessons, voice music lessons, drama lessons, or no lessons groups
• IQ and social behaviour measured before and after lessons
• Compared with children in the control groups, children in both music groups exhibited greater increases in IQ
• Children in the drama group exhibited substantial improvements in adaptive social behaviour