problem solving and intelligence Flashcards
(22 cards)
intelligence
- psychologists make 2 assumptions:
1. intelligence involves the ability to perform cognitive tasks
2. capacity to to learn from experience and adapt - Sternberg= intelligence is the cognitive ability of an individual to learn from experience
deductive and inductive reasoning
- deductive= occurs when a person works from ideas and general information to arrive at specific conclusion
- inductive= moving from specific facts and observations to broader generalizations and theories
functioning fixedness
our difficulty seeing alternative uses for common objects
2 important qualities of a test
- validity= measure the extent to which a test is actually measuring what the researcher claims to be measuring
- reliability= measures the extent to which repeated testing produces consistent results
Francis Galton
- modern study of intelligence often credited to him
- goal was to quantify intelligence in an unbiased manner
insight problems
-problems/ riddles can be difficult because of functional fixedness- our difficulty seeing alternative uses for common objects
Standford- Binet Intelligence test
-Binet developed the first intelligence scale which included thirty short tasks related to everyday life
charles spearman
- firm believer in a single type of intelligence
- observed that most people who performed well on classical intelligence tasks performed well on all kinds of tasks
- reasoned this was the case because there is one generalized intelligence which he named “g”
multiple intelligences
- gardner argued for 8 different types of intelligence:
- verbal
- mathematical
- musical
- spatial
- kinesthetic
- interpersonal
- intrapersonal
- naturalistic
- each type of intelligence is dependent from the others
Wechsler scales
- WAIS= Wechsler Adult Intelligence Scale
- WISC= Wechsler Intelligence Scale for Children
- IQ scores are standardized so that someone who achieves the mean score will be assigned an IQ of 100
- IQ scores surrounding the mean are assigned around a perfect normal distribution with a standard deviation of 15
- specific IQ is relative to the performance of the rest of the population
genetic contributions
-IQ measures between identical twins showed a strong positive correlation +0.8; this was significantly greater than the +0.6 positive correlation found in fraternal twins (suggests a role of genes in the development of intelligence)
environmental contributions
twin studies where identical twins were adopted in separate households show correlation is still quite high at about 0.73
the Flynn effect
- the observation that raw IQ scores have been on the rise since 1932
- increased quality in schooling has played a large role in this increase
- increase access to info through books, TV and internet
- increased nutrition and health
Jean Piaget
- fundamental idea that children are active learners
- children incorporate new info with what they know
- schema= mental framework for interpreting the world around us
- children’s schemas are undeveloped
- through a process of assimilation, a child manipulates incoming information so that it makes sense with their existing schema
- if new info is incompatible with existing schema, the child must more drastically alter their schema for the new information to make sense through a process called accommodation
- through assimilation and accommodation, the child actively learns and develops as they interact with the environment
4 stages of cognitive development
- sensorimotor
- preoperational
- concrete operational
- formal operational
- children can progress through the stages at different rates but must pass through the stages in the same order and no stages can be skipped
sensorimotor stage
- 0-2
- child recognizes they can affect change on their environment
- begin to purposely engage with the world, act with intention
- object permanence- objects can continue to exist when the child can no longer see them
properational stage
- 2-7 y.o.
- child is egocentric = has difficulty understanding the world from a perspective other than their own
- child has difficulty with seriation tasks= the ability to logically order a series of objects (e.g. setting sticks from shortest to longest)
- difficulty with reversible relationships
(e. g. asking rachel if she has a brother and her saying yes, asking if her brother has a sister and her saying no) - difficulty with conservative tasks
(e. g. fluid conversation having 2 identicla glasses of milk and then pouring one into a taller glass with the child then thinking the taller glass has more milk, even though they saw you pour it they don’t realize its at a higher level because the glass is tall and narrow
concrete operational stage
- 7-12 y.o.
- child schemas still concrete and based on their experience with the world
- child in this stage unable to think in abstract terms or reason based on hypotheses
formal operational stage
- 12+
- children able to think in abstract terms, work with hypotheses, do everything else that makes up the range of adult cognitive abilities
limitations
phenomenon of decalage- children sometimes develop skills out of order in the strictest sense of Plaget’s theories
biases
-confirmation bias= tendency to seek out information that directly supports the hypothesis
heuristic
- mental “shortvut” used to solve a problem quickly, often correctly
- reduce effort and simplify decision making
- available heuristic= tendency to make decisions based on the information that is most quickly available to us
- representativeness heuristic= our tendency to estimate the likelihood of a current example by comparing it to an existing prototype in our mind of what we consider to be the most relevant or typical example of a particular category
