Intelligence According To Spearman's Theory

Intelligence is defined as the ability to acquire, use and understand knowledge. Intelligence refers to the cognitive abilities of an individual to understand complex concepts, learn from various experiences, to reason well and to cope effectively with the demands of daily living. Intelligence has been the subject of intense study since the development of the science of pyschology and there are many different and varied views about it. Pyschologists still have no agreements on how many different kinds of intellectual abilities exist. Psychologists believe that instead of trying to answer the question, we need to understand the basic cogintive process underlying intelligence. We can divide the theorists who study intelligence in two different

According to him, individuals who performed well on one type of intelligence task tend to do good as many other tasks although their scores on these tasks are seldom same. He proposed that any given task reflects both types of intelligence. General intelligence cuts across specific type of items and accounts for similar level of performance on a variety of items. By contrast, specific intelligence is related to the particular task and this is responsible for the fact that each person does better on some task than other. Spearman (1923) believed that individual differences in g were seen in the ability to use 3 principles of cognition -education of relations, apprehension of experience and education of correlations. These 3 principles can be explained by examining how we solve analogies of the form A:B:C:? that is A is to B as C is to? A simple example might be Hammer:Nail:Screwdriver? To solve this analogy, we must first perceive and understand each term based on the past experience i.e. we must have apprehensionof experience. If we have no idea what a hammer, nail and screw driver are there is very less change of completing the analogy correctly. Next, is to infer the relation between the two concepts as education of relations. The final step, education of correlation refers to the ability to use the inferred principle in the above case, applying the rule inferred principle in the above case, applying the rule inferred to produce the correct response, screwdriver : screw.In part because there is no universal agreement on the precise definition of intelligence and the way in which should be measured, theorists differ in how they conceptualize intelligence. Let’s say if we view intelligence not as a single overall ability but as a collection of abilities. It follows then, that any