Intelligence Theories - Gómez, Soledad

Francis Galton essential idea was that there are stable biological differences in intelligence between people. Individual differences in intelligence reflect differences in the efficiency of operation of simple neural processes.
His book: Hereditary Genius (1892)

Galton noted that for any of our 'natural gifts' (physical, temperalmental or intellectual) there will be an 'average' amount of that feature, to which most people approximate.
Galton also introduced the idea of 'co-relation' or correlation, which is a measure of the extent to which two variables, such as weight and height, are related.

Spearman said that there was a 'general' intelligence underlying performance on very different tasks. He regarded general intelligence, or g, as a unitary, biological and inherited determinant of measurable intellectual differences.

Alfred Binet proposed that we all pass through certain developmental stages, and that to understand these stages we should consider the 'higher faculties' of the mind rather than 'low-level' neural processing.
He also developed the first intelligence tests that would identify children in need of special education (1904).

Binet used the idea of the average age at which a task was mastered to derive a child's mental age. Individual differences in intelligence can be expressed by a single score. A range of measures of performance on different kinds of knowledge, judgement and reasoning tasks can be taken together to contribute to our understanding of intelligence.

Louis Leon Thurstone (1938) argued that, rather than a single general intelligence, there are seven ‘separate and unique’ primary mental abilities: word fluency, number facility, verbal comprehension, perceptual speed, associative memory, spatial visualization and inductive reasoning.
Horn and Cattell (1966) identified two factors, which they labelled fluid intelligence (Gf) and crystallized intelligence (Gc).

Arthur Jensen proposed the possibility that intelligence, or psychometric g, is based on the speed with which we process information but reaction time experiments were subsequently criticized on the basis that the response time could be confounded by the speed or organization of motor responses and task strategies, rather than being a pure measure of speed of intellectual processing.

His theory said that there are many autonomous intelligences including linguistics, musical, logical-mathematical, spatial, bodily-kinaesthetic, personal, naturalist and spiritualist.
Gardner’s multiple intelligence model made a significant impact in the field of education, with schools developing broader and more responsive approaches to assessment, and a more diverse curriculum to help develop individual intelligences in each student.

Sternberg proposes several types of intelligence: analytical intelligence, creative intelligence and practical intelligence. He suggests that each kind of intelligence involves a control hierarchy of cognitive components that contribute to our ‘mental self-management’ – these include a) performance components, b) knowledge acquisition components and c) metacomponents.