Intelligence trait: Encyclopedia II - One or several types of intelligence?

Intelligence trait - One or several types of intelligence?

Most experts accept the concept of a single dominant factor of intelligence, general mental ability or g, while others argue that intelligence consists of a set of relatively independent abilities (American Psychological Association task force report, Gottfredson 1998). The evidence for g comes from factor analysis of tests of cognitive abilities. The methods of factor analysis do not guarantee a single dominant factor will be discovered. Other psychological tests which do not measure cognitive ability, such as personality tests, generate multiple factors.

Proponents of multiple-intelligence theories often claim that g is, at best, a measure of academic ability. Other types of intelligence, they claim, might be just as important outside of a school setting.

Yale psychologist Robert J. Sternberg has proposed a Triarchic Theory of Intelligence. Harvard psychologist Howard Gardner's theory of multiple intelligences breaks intelligence down into at least eight different components: logical, linguistic, spatial, musical, kinesthetic, naturalist, intra-personal and inter-personal intelligences. Daniel Goleman and several other researchers have developed the concept of emotional intelligence and claim it is at least as important as more traditional sorts of intelligence. These theories grew from observations of human development and of brain injury victims who demonstrate an acute loss of a particular cognitive function -- e.g. the ability to think numerically, or the ability to understand written language -- without showing any loss in other cognitive areas.

In response, g theorists have pointed out that g's predictive validity has been repeatedly demonstrated, for example in predicting important non-academic outcomes such as job performance (see IQ), while no multiple-intelligences theory has shown comparable validity. Meanwhile, they argue, the relevance, and even the existence, of multiple intelligences have not been borne out when actually tested (Hunt 2001). The fundamental argument for a general factor is that test scores on a wide range of seemingly unrelated cognitive ability tests (such as sentence completion, arithmetic, and memorization) are positively correlated: people who score highly on one test tend to score highly on all of them, and g thus emerges in a factor analysis. This suggests that the tests are not unrelated, but that they all tap a common factor.

According to Jeff Hawkins, the brain's cortex implements a memory prediction system to form the basis of intelligence.

Adapted from the Wikipedia article "One or several types of intelligence?", http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intellect, under the G.N U Free Docmentation License. Please also see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki