Intelligence ≠ Smartness  

Intelligence testing is not simply measuring how smart you are 

Recently, I participated in a psychology study on intellect and causal reasoning. The researchers wanted to examine the relationships between measures of intelligence and associative learning. As one would expect, in order to measure the intelligence, they used a battery of tests that are designed to assess various components of intelligence. These tests included: Raven’s Matrices, Letter Series, Mental Rotation, Paper Folding, Visual Matching and Symbol-Digit Coding. All these tests are part of the Wechsler Adult Intelligence Scales (WAIS).

Raven’s Matrices is designed to measure the test-taker’s reasoning ability which is often referred to as general intelligence.

Mental Rotation is the ability to rotate mental representations of 2D or 3D objects. It is associated with the rate of spatial processing and intelligence. It is actually harder than we think, and require some cognitive processing: 1. Create a mental image of an object;

2. Rotate the object mentally until a comparison can be made;

3. Make the comparison;

4 decide if the objects are the same or not;

5. Report the decision

Paper Folding test is similar to mental rotation. It also tests the ability of spatial processing and reasoning. However, instead of rotating the object, test-taker needs to mentally fold a flat graph into a specific object, and find the matching objects given in the test.

Symbol-Digit Coding consists of digit-symbol pairs followed by a list of digits. Test-taker needs to write down the corresponding symbol as fast as possible within the allowed time. It examine the role of memory of coding performance and implicit learning.

The main question we ask when we measuring intelligence is how we define intelligence. Some researchers have proposed that intelligence consists of several sub-factors; whereas others believe that intelligence is a general ability that consists of several sub-factors. Some of these factors are fluid intelligence, crystallized intelligence, and processing speed. Fluid intelligence is the ability to solve reasoning problems, and crystallized intelligence is considered to be the accumulated knowledge over time. Because processes of learning and the transfer of learning are central to understanding how people develop important competencies. It is important to consider the ability to learn associations between events when measuring intelligence. Thus, we need to be aware of all possible factors when developing a test.