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Intelligence
Intelligence and the childMythsGeneticsStudy of intelligenceNature of giftednessCreativityFAQIdentificationPsychology testsIQ scoreIdentifying talentscharacteristicsExceptional qualitiesObservationsLists and limitationNurture
Protegy and childhoodSecret of successGenius factoryObjectionsAssembly lineGrowthCultivating talentsProblemsPlay and explorationSelf conceptFamily relationshipKindergartenUnderachieversPre-schoolPrenatal developmentInfanthoodStimulation|
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| Exceptional Qualities |
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| What difference is there?? |
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| Senses (of which we possess not five, but eleven, including temperature, balance, pressure etc.), attention, learning and memory and also the ability to move allow us to behave intelligently. There is no hard evidence that some individuals are inherently exceptional. Although their abilities might be unusually good at, say, learning and remembering anything that is related to their area of special expertise, but their special learning and remembering abilities are acquired skills, not innate qualities. Undoubtedly, individuals' patterns of performance at many learning and memory tasks are related to ability. Yet that is largely because skills that have been learned in the past and previously acquired knowledge largely determine how difficult a new task is perceived to be by the individual who is attempting it. When people are assessed at those kinds of learning tasks that cannot be made easier to perform as a result of a person having previously acquired knowledge or skills that facilitate them, individual differences in learning rate tend to be non-existent. In these circumstances young children may do just as well as adults, and mentally retarded people are just as successful as individuals having average or even superior ability. With memory tasks, too, if the nature of the task precludes the possibility of experienced people making use of their rate of success, there will be little, if any, difference in performance between adults and children. In a few circumstances young children actually do better than older people. In short, whilst it is quite true to say that individuals who have exceptional abilities are more successful than other people at memory and learning tasks in which the content is related to the person's special expertise, superiority at these tasks is the result of individuals having special skills, rather than the cause. Exceptionally able people are not innately better at learning or remembering; they only become better after they have begun to acquire unusual abilities. In fact, some research shows that in a number of instances the memory feats of ordinary people whose levels of measured intelligence are not above average but who have received intensive memory training, have actually exceeded those very feats of `outstanding' individuals which have been born with an inherently exceptional ability to remember. Much of our thinking (mental arithmetic, planning etc.) is done with our working memory. The capacity of working memory is tiny - only about seven items - and is a bottleneck in human intelligence. An item can be a number, a word, a sentence etc.. We improve capacity by grouping items into larger ones called chunks. For example, one starts at the individual note and chord level in music, but learns to group them into phrases, passages, and whole compositions. Studies show that experts organize what they know into larger useful chunks which allow great feats of problem solving and memory. Some chess masters can play not just one game without sight of the board, but up to forty five at the same time. Then when the exhibition is over, they can repeat all the game moves, accurately. They do it by chunks. But is this due to their exceptional inherent potential? Someone once tried to find out how far chunking could improve memory for meaningless digits, and a heroic but otherwise ordinary subject spent a couple of hours a day for two years being read digits quickly and repeating them back. Eventually, he soon got beyond the usual seven to an astronomical eighty. Having a lot of relevant knowledge also means a person can learn more about the area more easily than a novice who is more intelligent. Everyone knows people who are not particularly bright but who may be good at chess, betting, cooking. They know a lot and because they do they outperform the bright but less knowledgeable. Behaving intelligently often depend on knowing a lot. But can data storage be so amassed by mere mortals? Well, as far as anyone knows, no one has ever gone to a doctor complaining that his long-term memory capacity has been exceeded. In another heroic experiment, ordinary subjects viewed 10,000 pictures for a few seconds each, one after the other. Then they were shown pairs - one already seen and the other not - and had to say which was which. Subjects were about 90 per cent accurate, showing they were remembering something about most of the 10,000 pictures. Human memory is pretty good. There is however at least one notable exception. The possibility that innate differences in cognitive processes could be significant for later development has been revived by the finding that early difference in measures of infant looking behavior are predictors of subsequent differences in intelligence-test scores. The correlations tend to be small, but this may be due in part to the limited reliability of the infant measures.  DIFFERENCE BETWEEN THE GIFTED AND THE AVERAGE CHILD The word 'talented' and 'gifted' are potentially misleading. Each of them has led users to infer that children and adults can be firmly divided into distinct categories. A person is seen as being either talented (or gifted) or not talented (or not gifted). And if talented (or gifted, or even 'creative') children form a distinct group (or 'type'), one can, it is sometimes assumed, make statements that clearly apply to all individuals within that group and not to others. Similarly, once it has been accepted that it is appropriate to categorize people in this manner, it is often assumed that one can justify according special treatment or special provisions for individuals who are within the group, and regard the members of the group as forming a special and distinct category with special needs or interest (as in, for example, 'Association for Gifted Children') In reality, although it is undoubtedly true that some people are more able than others in various respects (or, if one prefers, 'more talented', or 'more gifted', or 'more creative') there are no clear dividing lines and no natural boundaries of the kind that would make it reasonable to assume, as people so often do, that there exist distinct or homogeneous groups to which terms like these can be applied. Generally speaking, people's ability levels vary along a continuum : sharp discontinuities are unusual. The fact that individuals differ in their capacity to perform various tasks in no way justifies our inferring that they fall into distinct categories of people, except in the sense that is achieved by inserting an arbitrary line, above and below which there are differing standards of performance. The kind of statistical categorization that is achieved in this way has limited value. It rarely forms a proper basis for making accurate generalizations about the people concerned. Consequently, one ought to be wary of making statements about, say, `making special provision for gifted children' because, appearance notwithstanding, the label `gifted' does not actually specify any clear grouping of children on the basis of particular characteristics or qualities that might legitimize their receiving special kinds of treatment. |
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