CHAPTER 9 – Intelligence

Publisher Summary This chapter reviews four different approaches to the understanding of intelligence: the psychometric, the cognitive, the contextual, and the systems approaches. Although each approach is different, and proponents of each approach try to highlight the advantages of their own approach over others, it turns out that the different approaches often address somewhat different questions and thus are not mutually contradictory. The psychometric approach tries to map the mind. The biological approach attempts to find intelligence in the brain. The cognitive approach tries to specify the mental representations and processes that underlie intelligence. The contextual approach tries to specify how context affects intelligence, thought, and action. Although contextual approaches have a definite edge on cognitive models in specifying the importance of context as an influence on cognitive performance, contextual approaches tend to be weak in the specification of cognitive processing. The systems approach tries to provide some integration of the cognitive and contextual approaches.