The Architecture of the Child Mind

g, Fs, and the Hierarchical Model of Intelligence

Marc H. Bornstein, Diane L. Putnick

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2019
• ISBN:
  9780429640001
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Bildung
• Subtopic: Bildungspsychologie

What exactly does it mean to be intelligent? Does intelligence manifest itself in one way or in different ways in children? Do children fit any preconceived notions of intelligence? Some theories assert a general ( g) factor for intelligence that is universal and enters all mental abilities; other theories state that there are many separate domains or faculties ( F s) of intelligence; and still others argue that the g and F s of intelligence coexist in a hierarchical relation. The Architecture of the Child Mind: g, Fs, and the Hierarchical Model of Intelligence argues for the third option in young children. Through state-of-the-art methodologies in an intensive research program conducted with 4-year-old children, Bornstein and Putnick show that the structure of intelligence in the preschool child is best construed as a hierarchically organized combination of a General Intelligence factor ( g ) and multiple domain-specific faculties ( Fs).

The Architecture of the Child Mind offers a review of the history of intelligence theories and testing, and a comprehensive and original research effort on the nature and structure of intelligence in young children before they enter school. Its focus on intelligence will appeal to cognitive, developmental, and social psychologists as well as researchers and scholars in education, particularly those specializing in early childhood education.

1 Introduction

People are perennially interested in human intelligence. At least since the ­classical Greeks, ideas stressing the existence and the importance of intelligence have occupied discussions of the human condition, and intelligence is among the most widely recognized and commonly accepted concepts in scientific psychology. Furthermore, the notions that individuals differ in intelligence, that such differences can be measured and studied scientifically, and that those individual differences have meaningful consequences in life rank among the significant ideas of human civilization. As one intelligence researcher observed, “No concept in the history of psychology has had or continues to have as great an impact on everyday life in the Western world” as intelligence (Scarr, 1989, p. 75).

The construct of intelligence is essential to understanding what it means to be human. Yet, vital as intelligence is to our self-knowledge, the concept has successfully eluded consensual definition. The histories of philosophy and of science are littered with failed attempts. A brief review is instructive – if how far back to begin is challenging – so we mention here only a smattering that cover the ages. Aristotle in Nicomachean Ethics (Book X. 7.14–15) stated that “intelligence … guides us and … gives us our notions of what is noble and divine … it is an activity of this part … that will be complete happiness.” Thomas Hobbes (1651/1982) in Leviathan (Part 1: Man, Chapter 1: Sense) placed intelligence at the core of what it means to be human: “an intelligent being seen; which, coming into the understanding, makes us understand.” Alfred Binet (1905) referred to intelligence as “Judgment, otherwise called ‘good sense’, ‘practical sense’, ‘initiative’, the faculty of adapting one’s self to circumstances … auto-critique.” David Wechsler (1958, p. 7), author of the most widely used tests of intelligence today, asserted that intelligence is “the aggregate or global capacity of the individual to act purposefully, to think rationally and to deal effectively with his [sic] environment.” And then there’s Alexander Wissner-Gross (2016), who defined intelligence this way: “F = T ∇ S _τ ”: “Intelligence is a force, F, that acts so as to maximize future freedom of action. It acts to maximize future freedom of action, or keep options open, with some strength T, with the diversity of possible accessible futures, S, up to some future time horizon, τ. In short, intelligence doesn’t like to get trapped.”

Various scholars, symposia, synopses, and summaries have appeared from time to time that have aggregated multiple definitions (Legg and Hutter, 2007; Sattler, 2008; Wasserman and Tulsky, 2005). A turn-of-the-20th-century symposium entitled “Intelligence and Its Measurement” convened to achieve consensus on the meaning of intelligence; published in 1921 in the Journal of Educational Psychology, it produced myriad definitions. Intelligence was variously described by luminaries of the time as the “ability to learn” (Buckingham), “the power of good responses from the point of view of truth or fact” (Thorndike), “the ability to carry on abstract thinking” (Terman), “the ability of the individual to adapt himself [sic] adequately to relatively new situations in life” (Pintner), “the capacity for knowledge and the knowledge possessed” (Henmon), and “the capacity to acquire capacity” (Woodrow). Sixty-five years later, when two dozen prominent theorists were asked to define intelligence, they offered two dozen definitions (Sternberg and Detterman, 1986). Later still, Sattler (1992) discussed more than 20 separate (yet somewhat overlapping) definitions of intelligence, many of which led to the development of distinct scales to measure a variety of skills and abilities. One 1997 “consensus” statement (endorsed by 52 “experts” – out of 131 invited to sign) read as follows: “Intelligence is a very general mental capability that, among other things, involves the ability to reason, plan, solve problems, think abstractly, comprehend complex ideas, learn quickly and learn from experience.” By 2007, surveying dictionaries, encyclopedias, and professional associations, Legg and Hutter collected 70+ definitions but opined that “compiling a complete list would be impossible” (p. 1). Wikipedia (the source of all continuously updated knowledge) defines intelligence “to include the capacity for logic, understanding, self-awareness, learning, emotional knowledge, reasoning, planning, creativity, and problem solving. It can be more generally described as the ability to perceive or infer information, and to retain it as knowledge to be applied towards adaptive behaviors within an environment or context.” In summary, famously, and perhaps out of exasperation to cut the Gordian Knot, E. G. Boring (1923, p. 35) proclaimed nearly a century ago simply that “intelligence is what is measured by intelligence tests.”

In “Intelligence: Knowns and Unknowns,” a late 20th century state-of-the-art report, the Board of Scientific Affairs of the American Psychological Association (Neisser et al., 1996, pp. 77) declared:

Individuals differ from one another in their ability to understand complex ideas, to adapt effectively to the environment, to learn from experience, to engage in various forms of reasoning, to overcome obstacles by taking thought. Although these individual differences can be substantial, they are never entirely consistent: a given person’s intellectual performance will vary on different occasions, in different domains, as judged by different criteria. Concepts of “intelligence” are attempts to clarify and organize this complex set of phenomena. Although considerable clarity has been achieved in some areas, no such conceptualization has yet answered all the important questions, and none commands universal assent.

A further contemporary challenge is recognition today that intelligence needs to be defined, assessed, and studied at (at least) three different levels: physiological, psychometric, and social.

The Latin root for the word intelligence translates roughly as “to comprehend or perceive.” Perhaps, intelligence is best broadly defined as involving “the ability to reason, plan, solve problems, think abstractly, comprehend complex ideas, learn quickly and learn from experience” (Gottfredson, 1997, p. 13). No matter; intelligence is a subject of intensive study and continuing debate: See, for example, Deary’s (2001) Intelligence, Cianciolo and Sternberg’s (2004) Intelligence, Goleman’s (2005) Emotional Intelligence, Hunt’s (2011a) Human Intelligence, Bjorklund’s (2011) Children’s Thinking, Richie’s (2016) Intelligence: All That Matters, and Haier’s (2016) The Neuroscience of Intelligence.

If scientists cannot agree on how to define intelligence, many agree on its significance, many on the fact that people differ in how much intelligence they have, and many in the belief that intelligence can be measured. These certain features of intelligence are widely accepted.

• On significance: Intelligence is positively valued (Goodnow, 1986; Mugny and Carrugati, 1989), adaptive (Piaget, 1956; Sternberg, 1986), and involves solving problems (Laboratory of Comparative Human Cognition, 1982; Sternberg, 1986; Thorndike, Bregman, Cobb, and Woodyard, 1927). A lingering mystery is why there is so little consensus on exactly what it means for someone to be intelligent.

• On individual variation: Long ago, Francis Galton (1869) in Hereditary Genius sought to prove that people differed in their natural mental abilities. They do. A lingering mystery is why there is so little consensus on how and why one person is more intelligent than another.

• On measurement: Intelligence is an ability or cluster of abilities whose existence is normally inferred on the basis of performance on a test. What intelligence tests measure is tied to the issue of defining what intelligence is. Here, validity in its many construals comes into play. A lingering mystery is how best to measure intelligence.

Most definitions of intelligence used to determine the content of tests emphasize the face validity of specific abilities to (1) manipulate numbers; (2) think abstractly; (3) form relations among words, objects, or numbers; (4) adapt to novel environments; (5) apply past experience to the solution of current problems; and (6) adjust to real-world environments that are relevant to everyday life (Sattler, 1992). Moreover, for an intelligence test to qualify as a measure of intelligence, the test should have construct validity – results that agree with some external, independent criterion of intelligence – and predictive validity – results that foretell future performance.

Educational and occupational attainment have been the most popular external validators of intelligence tests, meeting criteria of construct and predictive validity, as most intelligence tests have been designed to measure mental abilities that are important for success in academic work or in similar endeavors outside the classroom. Correlations between intelligence test scores and formal tests of reading, mathematics, or other subjects, and between intelligence test scores and school performance or grades, range between .40 and .70 (Brody, 1992; Jensen, 1980; Lavin, 1965; Vernon, 1947).

Beyond definition and measurement of intelligence, the very structure of intelligence has been elusive and controversial. What we think we know about the structure of intelligence originates in theoretical models that reciprocally shape the way intelligence has been defined, measured, and studied. Historically, two models of intelligence have dominated scientists’ understanding of its structure. Some theoreticians and researchers have contended that intelligence consists of a general ability that accounts for individual differences in performance in a wide variety of intelligence tasks and can be measured psychometrically; others have held that a single general ability provides an incomplete description of intelligence and argued for the greater relevance and validity of multiple abilities for specialized particular performance situations. This contrast has deep roots in philosophy and epistemology for it calls to mind the Greek philosopher and lyric poet Archilochus (c. 680–c. 645 b.c.) who distinguished people who view intellect as of a piece (“hedgehogs”) and people who favor fragmentation of intellect into components (“foxes”); for modern treatments, see Gould (2011) and Berlin (2013). Hedgehogs believe in the significance of a singular intellectual capacity, that individuals are born with a certain amount of intelligence, and that intelligence can be measured and arrayed dimensionally so that individuals can be ordered in terms of an amount. An equally venerable tradition on the trail of foxes valorizes numerous distinct functions of mind, allows for profiles of individuals according to different manifestations, and calls on multiple domains of analysis. The school of hedgehogs (following Spearman, 1927) subscribes to the monoarchic “general factor” view of intelligence; the school of foxes (following Thurstone, 1935) posits a loose confederation of “primary mental abilities.” Contemporary theoreticians of intelligence have merged the two into a composite hierarchical structure (following Carroll, 1993), as we do here. Accounts of the history of intelligence testing and of the leading figures in that history, as well as of the many controversies they generated, can be found in several sources (see Fancher, 1985; Gould, 2011; Sokal, 1987; Zenderland, 1998).

Following a short general introduction to mental testing, we briefly and critically discuss these three traditional conceptions of the structure of intelligence. We then proceed to consider the theoretical framework that undergirds the empirical study we present in this volume. There is long-standing and good agreement that human children and adults have intelligence and differ among themselves in intelligence, but there has been less confidence until relatively recently in the nature of the structure of intelligence. The work we relate in this volume speaks to the question of structure. Note that in this volume children have played key roles in the telling of this story of mental testing and intelligence.

Mental Testing

A significant impairment to addressing central questions about intelligence rests on the fact that intelligence per se cannot be observed. Rather, intelligence is inferred from behavior. Intelligence is a Kantian noumenon – something that exists apart from human sense and perception. The dominant approach to measuring intellectual ability or abilities has been through standard psychometric mental tests; but theorists who contend that there are many different intelligences suggest by corollary that only a few have been captured this way. A mental test usually consists of collections of tasks, uses visually or auditorily presented verbal, mathematical, or symbolic materials, and requires examinees to perform the tasks. Successful performance on the tasks in mental tests is thought to call on one or more kinds of intellectual ability, where other characteristics (diligence, motivation) and other factors (gender, socioeconomic status) are thought to be less critical. Tests are usually administered individually, and testing requires an examiner with special training. The process of administering intelligence tests has changed remarkably little in the century since mental testing originated.

Intelligence test theory turns on certain assumptions: that different tasks yield reliable measures of characteristic behaviors of the individuals who perform the tasks; that individuals can be ordered on a scale reflecting different degrees of ability on those tasks; that abilities are distributed normally so that measurements can be transformed to scales with at least interval properties; and that successful performance on the tasks strictly reflects mental ability or cognitive competence of the individual.

As is by now well known, the first practically useful intelligence test was developed in the early 1900s by Alfred Binet with his collaborators, Victor Henri and Théophile Simon (Binet and Henri, 1898; Binet and Simon,1904). The introduction of (nearly) universal primary education had brought into French elementary schools numbers of children who had not previously attended school and seemed not to profit from normal classroom teaching. These children were deemed to be of apparently below-average intelligence and in need of special education. The problem was to devise a quick and inexpensive way of identifying them.

Based on extensive trial and error, Binet and his colleagues devised a series of tasks of increasing difficulty for 4-, 6-, 8-, and 10-year-old children (Binet and Simon, 1911, 1916). Binet realized that, by tapping a variety of cognitive tasks at different levels of difficulty and organizing the items according to the age levels at which children of normal intellectual functioning were likely to succeed, Binet and Simon could also arrive at a scale that would classify children’s levels of mental functioning based on the number of items children passed at the various levels. In 1905, they introduced a new test for measuring intelligence, called the Binet–Simon scale. The test consisted of different kinds of simple-to-complex tasks. The first version was composed of clinical procedures that did not result in a summary score, but later revisions provided such a summary score (“mental level”) that still later was developed into the concept of the intelligence quotient (Intelligenzquotient or IQ, defined roughly as mental age divided by chronological age by Stern, 1912) and soon after adopted by Terman (1916) at Stanford University in the United States (hence the Stanford–Binet). Binet thus designed the precursor to the modern-day intelligence test. By the 1920s, mental tests were used in schools to measure children’s intell...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half-Title
• Title
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• Detailed Table of Contents
• List of Plates
• List of Tables
• Acknowledgements
• 1 Introduction
• 2 Empirical and Theoretical Foundations
• 3 Methods
• 4 g, Fs, and Their Hierarchical Structure
• 5 Family and Maternal Sociodemographic Factors, g, and Fs: Family Socioeconomic Status, and Maternal Education, Verbal Intelligence, Parenting Knowledge, and Age
• Plates
• 6 Child Characteristics, g, and Fs: Cognitive Competence, Creativity, Musical Ability, Behavioral Adjustment, and Everyday Experiences
• 7 Subpopulation Analyses of Child Intelligence: Child Gender, Birth Order, Adoption Status, and Experience in Preschool
• 8 Individual Difference Patterns of Faculties
• 9 General Discussion: Head, Heart, and Hand
• Bibliography
• Index