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Despite the interest in the problem of intellect, which has not subsided for decades, (“intellect” from lat. intellectus - understanding, reason, mind, mind) in various fields of knowledge, there is still no single approach to understanding its essence and structure.

As A. Anastasi rightly noted, “intelligence should be considered as a descriptive rather than an explanatory concept”*. This is probably why each author, giving his own definition of intelligence, describes either the composition of the mental operations included in it (thus often identifying intelligence and thinking), or its functions, purpose in human life and activity, without revealing its essence.

* Anastasi A. Psychological testing. Book. 1. M.: Pedagogy, 1982. S. 309.

So, in the philosophical encyclopedic dictionary, intelligence is defined (with reference to the origin of this concept) as the ability of thinking, rational cognition, as well as a relatively stable structure of mental abilities. D. Olson and T. Teyler agree with this position, considering the intellect as a system of skills, actions, operations, mental techniques, the nature of which depends on the culture of society; M. Schurer understood intelligence as a relatively constant structure of ontogenetically determined abilities to comprehend and create meaningful and functional connections.

Representatives of cognitive psychology propose to define intelligence as the ability to acquire, reproduce and use knowledge to understand concrete and abstract concepts and relationships between ideas and objects, as well as to use this knowledge in a meaningful way.

A very common approach to understanding intelligence is from the point of view of its role in the success of a person's adaptation to the world around him. Thus, D. Wexler, the author of one of the most famous tests of intelligence, interprets intelligence as the global ability of an individual to act intelligently, think rationally, and effectively interact with the environment, adapting it to his capabilities. V. Stern considered the intellect to be a general spiritual adaptive ability to new tasks and conditions of life, helping to overcome difficulties in newly emerging situations, A. Anastasi - a complex of abilities necessary for survival and success in a particular culture.

Position occupies a special place M.A. Cold, considering intelligence from the point of view of its ontological status as a form of organization of individual mental experience, including cognitive, metacognitive and intentional levels, and she proposes to evaluate individual intelligence itself in four aspects: how a person processes information, can he control the work of his intellect, why he thinks exactly like that and about this and how he uses his intellect.

So, speaking of intelligence, we should recognize it as a special form mental(as opposed to emotional or motivational) activity designed to interact with the surrounding reality and solve emerging problems and problems. At the same time, most scientists disagree about the composition of intellectual functions and the factors that determine its emergence and development.

The structure of the intellect. Regardless of what approach, conceptual or empirical, the authors of intellectual concepts are based on, in general they can be divided into two groups. The authors belonging to the first group consider the structure of the intellect as a set of independent, albeit organized in different ways, mental abilities; the authors who make up the second group give preference to hierarchical models.

A classic example of a multifactorial theory of intelligence is the model of L. Thurstone, who singled out seven so-called primary mental abilities that manifest themselves independently of each other and are responsible for specific groups of intellectual operations. These are the following abilities: to understand the meanings of words; to quickly finding words corresponding to a given criterion; to operating in the mind with spatial relationships; to easy handling of digital material; to logical reasoning; to memorization and reproduction of information; to the perception of visual images. Developing the ideas of L. Thurstone, J. Gilford creates a structural model of intelligence, in which each factor is characterized by a combination of one of the five types of mental operations (recognition and understanding of the presented material, search in one direction in the presence of a single correct answer, search in different directions in the presence of several equally correct answers, assessment of the correctness or logicality of a given situation, memorization and reproduction of information), four forms of material content (concrete, symbolic, semantic, behavioral) and five varieties of the end result of intellectual activity (single objects, classes of objects, relationships, systems, transformation of material, implications or foresight of the result), which leads to the presence of at least 120 separate intellectual abilities. In continuation of these ideas, the concept of J., Carroll, including 24 factors, the "Berlin model of the structure of intelligence" by A. Yakr, based on the use of 191 tests, and others have been developed.

Note that this approach, although interesting from a theoretical point of view, is not constructive from a practical point of view and significantly complicates the solution of the problem of measuring intelligence.

Another group of concepts is based on the idea of ​​having a common intelligence factor. (« general factor»), ultimately determining the specificity and productivity of all human intellectual activity. A classic example of such an approach is Ch. Spearman's two-factor theory of intelligence, who believed that the factor " G” represents a special “mental energy”, the differences in the level of which determine individual abilities to establish connections and relationships between the elements of their own knowledge and the elements of the content of the test task.

In addition to the general factor, Spearman included in his model a specific factor " S”, which was subsequently differentiated into groups of arithmetic, mechanical and linguistic abilities.

The most consistent supporter and successor of Spearman's idea was his student J. Raven, who developed his own test of progressive matrices, which is still one of the best methods of "pure" measurement of general intelligence, the main indicator of which is the ability to learn based on the generalization (conceptualization) of one's own experience in the absence of external guidance.

R. Cattell's research on intelligence made it possible to single out two components in the general factor: "crystallized intelligence" (crystallized), based on the use of the subject's experience, and "current intelligence" (fluid), manifested in tasks that require adaptation to new conditions and situations, due to hereditary factors. In addition to basic intellectual abilities, Cattell included in the structure of intelligence the ability to manipulate images when solving divergent problems (visualization factor), the ability to store and reproduce information (memory factor) and the ability to maintain a high response rate (speed factor).

Subsequently, the idea of ​​general intelligence was adopted by psychologists engaged in the practical study of intelligence based on the development of appropriate psychodiagnostic tools - intellectual scales (D. Wexler, R. Amthauer). The hierarchical model of intelligence in these concepts included three levels: 1) general intelligence; 2) specific (group) factors of intelligence (for Wexler - these are verbal and non-verbal; for Amthauer - verbal, mathematical and spatial); 3) private intellectual abilities corresponding to the psychological content of individual subtests of intellectual scales, as well as the general stock of knowledge, erudition, abilities for analytical and synthetic activity, generalization, combinatorial ability, abilities for abstract thinking and visual-effective thinking, etc.

Thus, the answer to the question about the content or structure of intelligence is no more certain than about its essence, and the interpretation of the results of practical research of intelligence depends on the specific concept within which the tools used are developed.

Whatever concept that reveals the essence of intelligence, we prefer, as soon as we turn to the person (subject) as the carrier of intelligence, the question naturally arises: how can one not only describe the intellectual component of the personality structure, but also measure it.

The idea of ​​measuring intelligence has received its most complete embodiment in the concept IQ (IQ), introduced by V. Stern in 1912 and understood as a quantitative indicator of the level of intellectual development. Initially, this indicator was considered as the ratio of two indicators: mental (intellectual) age, formulated by A. Binet and determined through the degree of complexity of test tasks available to the subject, and chronological age. The IQ formula, first used in the Binet-Simon scale, is as follows:

However, numerous studies of the intellectual development of people of different ages, which revealed the non-linear nature of age-related changes in intelligence, as well as the development of the mathematical and statistical apparatus of psychological research, forced psychologists to abandon this method of measurement and introduce standard indicators. IQ, based on the statistical place that an individual occupies in his age group. For the first time, such a method for determining the IQ was used by D. Wexler. He also proposed a qualitative classification of intelligence development levels obtained from an American sample, based on the frequency of occurrence of a certain IQ (see Table 3.1).

Table 3.1. Classification of levels of intellectual development according to D. Wexler

Note that most psychologists who use indicators in their work IQ, this table is used for their interpretation. However, as A. Anastasi rightly notes, due to the increasing use of standard IQ it is important to remember that they are comparable only when using the same or similar statistical indicators of the distribution curve.

In addition, since intelligence can hardly be considered as a single and uniform ability, and its complex structure should be taken into account, then information only about the general level of its development is far from sufficient to adequately use knowledge about the intellectual development of a person for practical work with him.

In this regard, when applying any measurement procedures, it is recommended not to be limited only to the definition and interpretation IQ, a supplement them with an analysis of the correlation of various aspects of intelligence, for example, verbal and non-verbal, practical and theoretical, mathematical, technical, etc. An important point is also the comparison of performance in subtests that study individual, particular intellectual abilities, their correlation, as well as the analysis of the correctness of answers to specific tasks of each subtest, taking into account the specifics of their location. Finally, by supplementing the quantitative characteristic of intelligence with an analysis of the qualitative indicators of the responses and behavior of the subject in the testing process, one can get a fairly complete picture of the nature of the intellectual development of the individual.

The problem of inheritance of intelligence. The problem of inheritance of mental abilities has always been very painful for society. We all want to know how much we can inherit the abilities of our ancestors and pass them on to our descendants. For the first time, this question was scientifically justified by F. Galton, who carried out in the second half of the 19th century. the study of pedigree lines in which there were many gifted people. In 1869, Galton published the book Hereditary Genius, in which he substantiated the idea of ​​the hereditary nature of mental abilities. The main evidence was the statistics of inheritance of special levels of intellectual behavior - giftedness, talent and genius. Galton, by mathematical calculations, proved that the probability of inheriting talent is approximately 80%, and the distribution of different degrees of giftedness is close to normal. In other words, the higher the degree of giftedness, the fewer people possessing it. However, not all scholars agreed with this view. The opposite concept interpreted the intellect as an exclusively acquired, life-formed property of a person.

The modern point of view is to determine the mutual influence on the development of intelligence of both genetic (innate) and environmental (acquired) factors.

Theory IQ proceeds from the assumption that intelligence is to a greater extent a hereditarily given ability of a person. Its quantitative characteristic comes from the analysis of polygenes that determine intellectual abilities. The most common level of intellectual abilities is taken as a conditional value of 100 points.

However, there is no unequivocal evidence of a rigid hereditary conditionality of intelligence. It should be noted that there are quite a lot of studies devoted to the analysis of the genetic and environmental components of intelligence. Generalization of data from various studies, as I.V. Ravich-Shcherbo, allows us to conclude that the higher the degree of kinship, the greater the similarity in intelligence.

This general conclusion is confirmed by the analysis of specific indicators. In a study by R. Plomin and F. Freese, it was found that the similarity to the general IQ monozygotic twins grown together corresponds to 0.86. In monozygotic twins separated in childhood, the similarity is lower, but much greater than, for example, siblings living together, but having only 50% of the same genes.

The genetic determination of intelligence is also confirmed by studies comparing the intelligence of children and their biological parents. In particular, a particularly close relationship is observed between the intelligence of children and their biological mothers. For example, if a child had a biological mother with IQ above 120 points, then, even if he gets into a foster family with a lower intelligence, he will retain high intelligence with a probability of 0.6. At the same time, a child who had a biological mother with IQ below 95 will never have high intelligence. However, these results do not indicate unambiguous influence genotype for intelligence. The environment, in particular training and upbringing, influence the features of the manifestation of intelligence within a given intellectual norm. In other words, children with approximately equal intellectual abilities will master, for example, the school curriculum with varying degrees of success, depending on the conditions of education and upbringing. A particularly important role is played not by the individual, but by the general family environment. At the same time, the influence of the family environment decreases by adolescence and is reduced to nothing in adults. The influence of the environment provokes the phenomenon of a decrease in intelligence in a large family, according to the serial number the birth of a child. In particular, A number of studies indicate that in a large family there is a tendency for intelligence to decrease as the child's birth number increases. Moreover, this tendency is the higher, the shorter the interval between births.

There are results indicating a different role of genetic influence on non-verbal and verbal intelligence. A number of works confirm the fact that verbal intelligence is more genetically determined than non-verbal intelligence. Moreover, with age, the influence of the genetic component increases.

A regularity was revealed that the influence of the genotype and the environment has its own dynamics due to age. In early childhood, the formation of the psyche is largely determined by hereditary and congenital factors. From the age of two, the directed formation of the brain by the conditions of social life begins. The level of culture of parents is passed on to their children. The development of intelligence relies on the enormous plasticity of the human brain. As a result, in the process of development, the level of intelligence acquires wide individual variability. Many scientists have dealt with this problem.

30/01/2015

All Western science is based on the desire to make knowledge about the world and man as objective as possible. What does it mean that this person is thin, and this one is fat? Tell us everyone's weight and height, waist and hip measurements, age and gender, average weight in the population, and a dozen more numbers. Without them, any conclusions are unacceptably subjective! Scientists seek to measure a person from all sides, to present in the form of tables, coefficients, constants and equations. Not content with defining simple physical parameters (force, pressure, volume, temperature, density, etc.), they try to measure complex psychophysiological phenomena, such as pain, emotions, quality of life, sexual attractiveness, etc. There were also attempts to “objectively” evaluate human intelligence. Various tests for determining the so-called intelligence quotient (IQ) have been used for about a hundred years, but even today there is no consensus on whether intelligence can be measured, and if it can be measured, are IQ tests suitable for this?

The problem of accurately assessing a person's abilities for thinking and cognition has excited scientific minds since ancient times, but active work in this direction began only in the 19th century, when phrenology quickly gained popularity. Adherents of this doctrine, measuring the parameters of the skull with a compass and a ruler, drew conclusions about the character and abilities of a person. As a result of numerous experiments, the main postulates of phrenology were refuted, but many ideas and observations were later borrowed by neuropsychologists, anthropologists and evolutionists.

A fundamentally different approach to assessing the mental abilities of a person was testing using specially selected questions and tasks. For the first time, tests to determine the level of intelligence appeared in the 7th century. in China. Officials passed mandatory exams, the results of which determined mainly the ability and degree of mastery of the Confucian doctrine. The better the result, the higher the position received.

In 1890 "intellectual tests" were used for the first time in psychology experiments. The idea belonged to the American psychologist James M. Cattell (1860–1944), who dreamed of transforming psychology into an exact science. As a model, Cattell proposed 50 tests, which included various measurements of sensitivity, reaction time, time spent naming colors, the number of sounds reproduced after a single listening, and others. He believed that applying a series of tests to a large number of individuals would reveal patterns of mental processes.

Alfred Binet: at the origins of IQ

When in France at the turn of the XIX-XX centuries. introduced universal compulsory primary education, it became obvious that some children, for various reasons, are not able to study according to standard programs and should be sent to special schools. An acute question arose about the method of quickly identifying "hopeless" students. Alfred Binet (1857–1911), the founder of the first experimental psychology laboratory in France, proposed a solution to the problem. In 1905, together with a colleague, psychologist and teacher Theodore Simon (1873-1961), Binet developed and published in the Psychological Yearbook a scale for determining the level of mental development of children. The test consisted of 30 tasks, for the solution of which, according to the authors, children needed to show the same psychological qualities as for school education: the ability to judge, memory, imagination, the ability to combine words into sentences, perform simple quantitative operations with objects and etc. The tasks were arranged in order of increasing difficulty in such a way that the probability of successful completion increased with chronological age. The level of difficulty was determined on the basis of data from a sample of 50 normal children aged 3-11 years and a small number of mentally retarded children.

Intelligence quotient (IQ)- quantitative assessment of the level of intelligence of a person: the level of intelligence relative to the level of intelligence of an average person of the same age

Three years later, Binet and Simon revised the test. Binet proceeded from the idea that the development of intelligence occurs independently of learning, as a result of biological maturation, and tried to remove from the test all tasks that require special training. In a group of normal children, psychologists, using tests, tried to identify different levels of intellectual development. To this end, they introduced the concept of "mental age" (or "mental level"). The tasks in the tests were selected in such a way that they could be solved by 75% of children of the corresponding age, whose intellectual development is considered normal. The number of correctly solved problems characterizes the mental age of the child; the discrepancy between mental and chronological age was considered an indicator of either mental retardation or giftedness.

Classic IQ Testing

In 1916, the Binet-Simon test was revised by a group of psychologists at Stanford University (USA) under the leadership of Lewis Terman (1877-1956), after which the "Stanford-Binet intelligence scale" began to differ from Binet's original tests. In particular, the intelligence quotient (IQ) was introduced as a final indicator and the test evaluation criterion - the statistical norm - was applied.

The concept of IQ was proposed in 1912 by the German psychologist William Stern (1871-1938). According to Stern, IQ = (mental age / chronological age) × 100. If the number of tasks solved by a child exactly corresponds to the statistical norm for his age, that is, his mental and chronological age are the same, then IQ = 100. The IQ calculated in this way in difference from Binet's "mental age" made it easy to classify normal children according to the degree of mental development. It is generally accepted that IQ values ​​in the range from 84 to 116 correspond to the age norm for performing the test; values ​​above 116 indicate a gifted child, below 84 indicate mental retardation.

Over time, the Stanford-Binet scale has been redesigned for use in both children and adults. At early age levels, tests require mainly visual-motor coordination, the ability to understand instructions, recognize objects, etc. At higher age levels, tests are most represented in which the verbal content of tasks is used: explanation of the meaning of words, analogies, completion of sentences, definition of abstract concepts, interpretation of proverbs. It should be noted that IQ does not depend on age; a child and an adult can have the same IQ, because the development of each of them corresponds to their age. In the West, the Stanford-Binet scale occupies one of the leading places among intelligence tests and is still the standard for assessing the reliability of the results of other psychometric tests.

All IQ tests created in the first decade of the 20th century made it possible to conduct an experiment with only one subject. However, in the age of industrialization and the "assembly line" this was unacceptable. In the United States during the First World War, a new form of IQ testing appeared - group testing. In 1917, the US military began using IQ tests to select and assign recruits to different branches of the military based on their intelligence. More than two million people have passed the exam. The definition of IQ "on the stream" required the simplification of the entire system of instructing, conducting and evaluating test results; now anyone could test, if there were blank forms with tasks and a list of correct answers. Soon, group IQ tests were adopted by universities and private companies, which began to use them in the selection of applicants and potential employees.

What determines IQ? After a long debate, most scientists agreed that IQ depends on genes by 60–80%, and from external conditions by 20–40%. IQ is not related to the baggage of acquired knowledge, therefore, “external conditions” usually do not mean education, but factors that can affect the development and productivity of the brain: nutrition (especially in early childhood), lifestyle, trauma, stress, etc.

In 1939, the first version of the scale was published, designed (rather than adapted, like the Stanford-Binet scale) specifically for adults. Its author was the American psychologist David Wexler (1896-1981), and it was called the Wexler-Bellevue scale. Unlike the Stanford-Binet scale, the tasks in this test are not grouped by age levels, but are combined into subtests and arranged in order of increasing difficulty. The test contains previously known types of tasks, however, Veksler additionally increased the objectivity of diagnostics by limiting the test execution time, as well as taking into account normative indicators - the average value of the test indicator for performing mental tasks for all representatives of this age group. The Wechsler test is still widely used to assess the level of intellectual development and determine the structure of a mental defect in children and adults. This method allows you to get an idea not only about the general level of intelligence, but also about the features of its structure.

IQ - to the people

In 1962, the book of the English psychologist Hans Eysenck "Know Your IQ" was published. It became an instant bestseller, was translated into many languages, and went through dozens of reprints over the course of half a century. In the book, Eysenck proposed his own version of IQ tests, and now everyone could evaluate their own intelligence and compare it with the intelligence of friends and colleagues! Today, on the Internet, you can find dozens of IQ tests in a minute, and half a century ago, Eysenck's book made a splash.

Eight versions of the Eysenck IQ test are known, designed for a general assessment of intellectual abilities using verbal, digital and graphic material and various ways of formulating tasks. With such a structure, according to Eysenck, the individual inclinations of the subjects will not distort the test results. Thus, a person who is good at verbal tasks, but poorly at arithmetic problems, will not receive any advantages, but will not be at a disadvantage either, since both types of problems are approximately equally represented in tests. Five Eysenck tests are designed for a general assessment of intelligence, three more for a special assessment of verbal, mathematical and visual-spatial abilities. In addition, Eysenck developed several complicated tests and called them "warm-up for intellectuals." Eysenck's IQ tests have gained immense popularity, but professionals - psychologists, neurologists, teachers, personnel officers - prefer more accurate methods: the Stanford-Binet, Wexler tests mentioned above or, for example, the test proposed in 1953 by the German psychologist Rudolf Amthauer.

Defendant: IQ

As long as IQ tests exist, so many disputes about their advantages, disadvantages, objectivity, moral and ethical permissibility, etc. do not subside. For example, in the USSR - a country of proclaimed universal equality - back in 1936, IQ tests were condemned, as they "distributed children into categories and, as a result, limited their opportunities." In the United States, the IQ-testing craze grew until the 1970s, until it crashed against the granite of the glorified American political correctness. It all started with a series of articles and books by famous American psychologists, which analyzed the statistics of IQ testing in the country. It was immediately stated in several publications that the IQ of representatives of the Negroid race is on average 10 points behind the IQ of representatives of the Caucasian and Mongoloid races. A scandal broke out, scientists were accused of racism, and IQ tests were called an insidious tool of apartheid. The debate about the incorrectness of using white tests to assess black intelligence, as well as about the possible social causes of racial differences in IQ, continues to this day. The reputation of IQ tests has been undermined. At the legislative level, the scope of their application is limited in the United States and a number of European countries. Now a low IQ there is not grounds for being denied employment, university or college. And in many countries it is forbidden to conduct tests when applying for a job.

Nevertheless, IQ tests are still popular among psychologists who use them in their professional activities, as well as "at the household level." High interest in the methods of "measuring" intelligence remains in the post-Soviet space, where they came relatively recently.

Probably, many, at least out of curiosity, tried to take an IQ test or tested their children, and, of course, noted a number of obvious shortcomings of IQ tests. First of all, experience in passing tests affects the value of the final IQ. When a person knows well what awaits him and how best to distribute strength and time between tasks, the result usually becomes noticeably better. The results of the test depend on the well-being of the subject, his mood, and even the gender of the person giving the tasks. Most of the tests are given "on time", which depresses the test subject, especially the child. Test results are influenced by motivation. If a person does not care what the result will be, he will not try and get a low score. In the same way, an inadequate result “shines” to the subject, who, due to excitement, cannot concentrate, is in a hurry and, because of this, makes more mistakes.

Tests are designed in such a way that an error is regarded as the inability of the test-taker to complete the task. In fact, if a person points out a mistake in time, he will return and, perhaps, correct it - this is exactly what happens in life. It should also be noted that IQ is calculated only by the final result, without taking into account the qualitative originality of human mental activity, which should also be attributed to serious shortcomings of IQ tests.

What do IQ tests measure anyway?

There are many scales for determining the intelligence quotient, however, like the first Binet tests, their main task is to predict the ability of the subject to learn. Is it running successfully? The search for a correlation between academic performance and IQ indicates the absence of a direct relationship between these indicators. People with low IQs do have poor academic performance. At the same time, those with an IQ of average or even high can study both excellently and badly. Approximately the same relationship between IQ and creativity. Those with very low IQs are rarely gifted with creative talent, while those with medium or high IQs are found to be both creative geniuses and untalented ones. Research shows that most (but not all!) successful people have high IQs, but that doesn't mean that all high IQs will succeed, or even try to.

What is called intelligence? There are many definitions, but most of them boil down to the fact that intelligence is a person's ability to know, understand and solve problems. To get a high score when passing an IQ test, you need to be able to concentrate and highlight the main thing, have a good memory, an extensive vocabulary, imagination, abstract thinking and perseverance. Of course, all these qualities are useful, but they do not fully reflect a person’s ability to know and understand, especially to solve problems, but they make him convenient for teachers, and often for employers!

By the way, in order to avoid endless questions and disputes about what exactly characterizes IQ, psychologists have introduced the term "psychometric intelligence". This is what IQ tests measure. They also like to jokingly repeat: “your IQ only reflects your ability to pass IQ tests ... and nothing else!”.

Science does not stand still, and the human intellect finds more and more complex and, perhaps, more accurate methods of "measuring" itself. Modern psychologists are actively developing a differentiated approach to assessing intelligence. Who is smarter: a Nobel laureate in physics who is embarrassed to ask a passerby for directions, or a good teacher who does not invent anything himself, but brilliantly teaches children? A brilliant chess player who has thousands of games in his head, but can't even cook scrambled eggs, or a brilliant sculptor who hasn't read a single book, but his hands work wonders? To deal with this, psychologists have identified several types of intelligence: theoretical, practical, social, etc. None of them coincides with psychometric ones, and special tests have been developed to assess each.

Prepared by Tatyana Tkachenko

In the photo (slider): model of the pathways of the human brain, obtained by tractography - imaging using diffusion-weighted magnetic resonance imaging.

“Pharmacist Practitioner” #03′ 2010

Intelligence quotient, read "iq") - is considered a quantitative assessment of the level of a person's intelligence: the level of intelligence relative to the level of intelligence of an average person of the same age. Many people think that this test is a fairly accurate and objective indicator of a person's intelligence and quick wits, but in fact it is not!

The concept of intelligence quotient was introduced by the German scientist Wilhelm Stern in 1912. He drew attention to the serious shortcomings of mental age as an indicator in Binet's scales. Stern suggested using the quotient of mental age divided by chronological age as an indicator of intelligence. IQ was first used in the Stanford-Binet Intelligence Scale in 1916.

Each IQ test consists of many different tasks of increasing difficulty. Among them are test tasks for logical and spatial thinking, as well as tasks of other types. Based on the results of the test, IQ is calculated. It is noticed that the more variants of the test the subject passes, the better results he shows. The most famous test is the Eysenck test. More accurate are the tests of D. Wexler, J. Raven, R. Amthauer, R. B. Cattell. At the moment there is no single standard for IQ tests.

The tests are divided into age groups and show the development of a person corresponding to his age. That is, a child at 10 and a university graduate can have the same IQ, because the development of each of them corresponds to its age group. The Eysenck test was developed for the age group of 18 years and older and provides for a maximum IQ level of 180 points.

At the present time, interest in IQ tests has increased many times over, as a result of which a wide variety of unreasonable scales have appeared. Therefore, it is very difficult to compare the results of different tests, and the IQ number itself has lost its informative value!

Initially, the intelligence quotient was generally only an ATTEMPT to assess the factor of general intelligence (g). What is it?

The general intelligence factor (eng. general factor, g factor) is a common but highly controversial construct used in psychology (and psychometrics) to identify common intelligence in various tests of intelligence. The phrase "theory g" deals with the hypothesis and the results obtained from it about the biological nature of g, the constancy / malleability, the relevance of its application in real life and other studies.

Charles Spearman, one of the first researchers in the field of psychometrics, found that schoolchildren's scores among supposedly unrelated subjects were positively correlated with each other, and found that these correlations reflected the influence of a predominant factor, which he called g, the factor of general intelligence. He developed a model where all differences in intelligence test scores can be explained by two factors. The first factor is specific to individual intellectual tasks - these are individual characteristics that allow a person to perform one intelligence task better than another. The second is g, the general intelligence factor, which is responsible for the success of intellectual tasks in general. However, Spearman's theory turned out to be too simple, as it ignored the influence of group factors (spatial memory, visualization, verbal abilities), which can also be detected using factor analysis.

The accumulation of information from intelligence tests and more modern techniques of analysis have retained the central role of g and led researchers to the modern theory of the g factor. The factor hierarchy, with g at the highest level and group factors at the lower levels, is currently the most widely used model of intelligence. Other models have also been proposed, around which heated debate has flared up regarding g and alternative theories of intelligence.

That is, again we are dealing not with a real, not with a real one, but with a mathematical model, moreover, based on very vague and abstract hypotheses!

Stephen Jay Gould, in his later writings, expressed his objections both to the concept of the g factor and to intelligence tests in general, as described in his controversial book Mismeasurements of Man.

Some artificial intelligence researchers have argued that the science of intelligence can be referred to as "computerism" and is "moronless and nonsensical", noting: "Intelligence tests measure differences in task performance that will soon for us computerized mechanisms. Such abilities have nothing to do with genius."

Intelligence expert Howard Gardner notes:

I don't believe there is one single common talent, whether it be called intelligence, creativity, or the g factor. I do not place talents inside the human brain, preferring to interpret all achievements as an interaction between mental potentials, on the one hand, and resources and opportunities provided by the surrounding cultural environment, on the other hand ... All intellectual and creative work is carried out within some kind of social disciplines, crafts or organized activities called competence. Accordingly, it makes no sense to say about a person that he is generally talented or creative.

Philip Kitcher wrote in 1985:

Many scientists are now convinced that there is no single measure of intellectual ability - no general intelligence. Their assumptions about the concept of general intelligence are based on the idea that different intellectual abilities do not correlate well with each other. ... It is useful for some to continue to expose the myth of "universal intelligence" to the public.

IQ tests are specifically designed so that the results are necessarily described by a normal distribution with an average IQ value of 100 and such a spread that 50% of people have an IQ between 90 and 110 and 25% each - below 90 and above 110, that is, in fact, this is just a straight forward nice looking math fit.

Doctor of Physical and Mathematical Sciences, Academician of the Russian Academy of Sciences V. A. Vasiliev found that in the Eysenck tests for the IQ, a significant part of the tasks was compiled incorrectly or the author's solutions were incorrect. Here are Vasiliev's statements on this subject:

I ... decided to study the tests without haste, especially since their answers did not systematically coincide with mine in problems from my professional fields: logic and geometry. Also found out that the majority of decisions of the author of tests is incorrect. And in some cases, the subject generally only has to guess the answer - it makes no sense to rely on logic!

If a person answered in the same way as Eysenck, then he thereby only demonstrates the standard of his thinking, a quick and predictable reaction to a simple stimulus, nothing more. A slightly less flat person will think a hundred times before answering ... There are a myriad of possible solutions to each such problem. The smarter you are, the more likely it is that your solution will not coincide with the author's.

The Soviet psychologist Lev Semyonovich Vygotsky showed in his works that the current IQ of a child says little about the prospects for his further education and mental development.

Even if an individual received more than 120 points when solving an iq test, this does not mean at all that he is a creative person, since creative people, as a rule, quite the opposite, think outside the box and unconventionally, rarely fitting into the rigid framework of iq tests.

A serious criticism of intelligence tests is that IQ cannot accurately predict individual performance on other intellectual tasks. Suppose that as a result of intelligence testing it turned out that a person has a high . Does this mean that he is bound to excel at another high-intelligence content challenge? The answer to this question is, of course, negative. It has been found that there is a correlation between the results of IQ tests and the results of similarly constructed academic assessment tests, such as the American academic aptitude tests (which they were designed to resemble). However, it is absolutely impossible to accurately predict IQ in any other indicators of intellectual activity, except for the results of tests belonging to the rather narrow category mentioned above. For example, research consistently shows that there is only an extremely weak correlation between IQ and ability to solve real-life problems. In some cases, only 4% of the difference in ability to solve real life problems is due to differences in IQ. In addition, Howe argues that if some well-known recognized geniuses were to pass the traditional intelligence test, they would receive very low marks. Intelligence tests are supposed to measure the level of "pure" intelligence. However, no one knows exactly what it really is! There are a lot of definitions of what intelligence is (a relatively stable structure of the mental abilities of an individual; the body's ability to use the knowledge gained; the general ability to know and solve problems, which unites all human cognitive abilities: sensation, perception, memory, representation, thinking, imagination) but none of them gives a complete and clear understanding.

It is important to understand that modern tests for determining the IQ are compiled in general with an emphasis on modern education with all its specifics, mistakes, misunderstandings, misinterpretations, erroneous dogmas and postulates, conditional systems of measurements and references, with all the distortions they contain, as a result at the end of training, they form the appropriate thinking - and in fact it is precisely this that is ultimately tested by testing! That is, in fact, IQ tests only determine how well the brain of a particular person "sharpened" for this particular knowledge and the education program that he received in schools / universities, but not the quality of his thinking and intelligence as such!

It is also noted that the more test options the subject passes, the better results he shows (which is quite logical).

Psychodiagnostics: lecture notes Alexey Sergeevich Luchinin

3. The concept of intellectual coefficient (IQ). Works by V. Stern

IQ score was offered V. Stern , who considered a significant drawback of the indicator of mental age that the same difference between mental and chronological age for different age levels has an unequal value. To eliminate this shortcoming, Stern proposed to determine the quotient obtained by dividing mental age by chronological age. This figure, multiplied by 100, he called the coefficient of intelligence. Using this indicator, it is possible to classify normal children according to the degree of mental development.

Another innovation of the Stanford psychologists was the use of the concept of a statistical norm. The norm became the criterion with which it was possible to compare individual test indicators and thereby evaluate them, give them a psychological interpretation.

The Stanford-Binet scale was designed for children aged 2.5 to 18 years. It consisted of tasks of varying difficulty, grouped according to age criteria. For each age, the most typical, average performance indicator (x) was 100, and the statistical measure of dispersion, the deviation of individual values ​​from this average (a), was 16. All individual test scores that fell into the interval x ± a, i.e. limited to the numbers 84 and 116, were considered normal, corresponding to the age norm of performance. If the test score was above the test norm (more than 116), the child was considered gifted, and if it was below 84, mentally retarded.

The Stanford-Binet scale has become popular all over the world. It had several editions (1937, 1960, 1972, 1986). The latest version is still in use today. The Stanford-Binet IQ has become synonymous with intelligence for many years. Newly created intelligence tests began to be checked for validity by comparing them with the results of the Stanford-Binet scale.

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