Putting your intelligence to the ultimate test
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“ Intelligence” may be defined as capacity for learning, reasoning, understanding, and similarforms of mental activity; aptitude in grasping truths,relationships, facts, meanings, etc or it can be referred to as manifestation of a high mental capacity.
With no agreed definition, measuring intelligence is fraught with problems. Unlike weight and height, which are unambiguous, there is no absolute measure of intelligence, just as there are no absolute measures of integrity, honesty or physical fitness. But just as it is apparent that some people are physically fitter than others, some people are also smarter than others. And just as there are tests that capture individual differences in physical fitness, we can devise tests that capture differences between individuals' cognitive abilities
There are few more controversial areas of science than the study of intelligence. Its history is littered with disreputable ideas, from phrenology and other pseudoscientific ways of measuring it to flawed attempts to link it to race. Today intelligence remains contentious, not least because there is still no agreement on precisely what the word means.
Most intelligence tests are based on performance at an assortment of different types of mental tasks. The most widely used is the intelligence quotient (IQ), now commonly measured using the Wechsler Adult Intelligence Scale. In this test, results from a 90-minute battery of tests of comprehension, vocabulary and arithmetic are combined to derive a final IQ score.
This measure of intelligence does seem to correlate with performance at school and work, so to this extent at least, IQ reflects how smart a person is.
After 20 years of research the scientists found smallest number of tests to cover the broadest range of cognitive skills that are believed to contribute to intelligence, from memory to planning. They called them 12 pillars of wisdom. You can measure your own pillars of wisdom, and get involved in what might be called the ultimate intelligence test.
1: Visuospatial working memory
When you navigate your way around an unfamiliar environment, you rely on visuospatial working memory. This component of intelligence contributes to many everyday feats, such as judging the trajectory of other vehicles while you are driving and remembering where you parked your car. It relies on storing information about the position of objects in your environment in working (or "short-term") memory and then retrieving it when you need it.
2: Spatial working memory
Imagine you are hunting for a pot of gold that you know is hidden in one room in a block of 100 apartments. What's the best strategy?
One option would be to search randomly, but that imposes a huge load on working memory because you would have to remember each apartment you have visited. A far smarter plan would be to organise your search, covering all the rooms in one apartment before moving on to the next, and covering all the apartments on one floor before moving on to the next. That way you can always keep track of where you are in the overall search without having to remember each and every apartment that you have already checked.
3: Focused attention
Read a word and you will automatically hear it pop into your head. This is an example of what is known as an overlearned or prepotent response. It is such a basic reaction that it is hard to inhibit. Doing so takes concentration and attention, which together form the foundations of this pillar of wisdom.
To measure this pillar of wisdom accurately requires a doubly hard version of the Stroop test in which the subject not only has to name the coloured word but also distinguish between two possible answers: for example, the word "red" written in green ink and the word "green" written in red ink.
4: Mental rotation
When you read a map while navigating, do you need to physically turn it to make sense of your direction or are you able to "mentally rotate" it in your head? This pillar of wisdom is linked to navigation and our ability to see things from a different perspective. It underlies many everyday activities, from finding your way home to recognising familiar objects placed in unusual positions or orientations.
5: Visuospatial working memory + strategy
The game called concentration (also known as pairs) begins with a standard pack of playing cards laid face down. On each player's turn, they choose two cards and flip them face-up. If the two cards are of the same value and colour the player wins that pair. If they don't match, the cards are flipped back. The aim of the game is to win as many pairs as possible.
Activities like this, including an online version devised by the MRC Cognition and Brain Sciences Unit team called Monkey Ladder, require not only visuospatial working memory but also an ability to devise and deploy strategies that keep track of cards you have seen.
6: Paired associate learning
Every day we have to link memories, such as a person with their telephone number. Psychologists call this paired associate learning, as you are required to pair two items in memory. This is essential in many aspects of everyday life, for example when learning a new word, which requires pairing the memory of how it sounds (or what it looks like when written down) with what it means. In short, it enables you to learn the connections between related concepts.
7: Deductive reasoning
Determining which one of a series of shapes is the odd one out is a classic reasoning test. At its simplest, say when there are five circles and a square, the answer is obvious. But as the variations in shape become more complex, the odd one out can only be identified by considering several aspects of the information at the same time. This relies on a pillar of wisdom known as deductive reasoning.
8: Visuospatial processing
The survival of our ancestors depended on the ability to detect an important shape in a complex background. Think of a lion lurking in long grass, or a ripe fruit hanging from a branch. When you mentally compare complex images with each other you rely on another pillar of wisdom, your brain's visuospatial processing skills. Even in the modern world, this is a useful skill. Imagine being in a burning house, trying to find the key that will open the front door among a huge bunch of keys, as flames threaten to engulf you.
9: Visual attention
Spot-the-difference puzzles are an old favourite in newspapers and magazines, and now appear online too. In the most common form, two subtly different versions of an image are shown side by side, and you have to find differences between them. This is a perceptual task that requires you to concentrate or focus your attention on complex images.
10: Verbal reasoning
If you are told that A is bigger than B and that C is bigger than A, the pillar of wisdom known as verbal reasoning tells you that C must be bigger than B, even though this information is not explicitly stated in the problem. This pillar can be measured by a variant of the Grammatical Reasoning Test developed in 1968 by Alan Baddeley, the former director of the MRC Cognition and Brain Sciences Unit (then called the MRC Applied Psychology Unit).
11: Verbal working memory
When you hold a new number in your head as you enter it into your phone, you rely on a pillar of wisdom known as verbal working memory - the ability to store a piece of verbal information for just as long as it is needed. This temporary memory bank allows you to make sense of convoluted sentences used by the likes of lawyers, bureaucrats and the manufacturers of electronic appliances.
12: Planning
Many activities are made up of a sequence of tasks that must be done in the right order. You have to buy the ingredients of a cake before you bake it; redecoration should take place before a room is carpeted; you need to check you have money before you go shopping. The capacity for such forward thinking can be probed with the Hampshire Tree task, which requires the subject to put a set of balls in the right order using as few moves as possible
Via:newscientist
