What do the Intelligence Tests analyze?

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Charles McCarthy
What do the Intelligence Tests analyze?

Intelligence is a very general mental capacity that allows you to reason, plan, solve problems, think abstractly, understand complex ideas, learn quickly, and learn from experience. It does not constitute a simple encyclopedic knowledge, a particular academic ability, or an ability to solve tests, but rather reflects a broader and deeper capacity to understand the environment, make sense of things or imagine what to do in each situation..

Measure intelligence

The psychometry of the aptitudes tries to measure what the psychological theory considers like own of the human intelligence. Individuals differ from each other in their ability to understand ideas, adapt effectively to the environment, learn in school contexts and from their own experience, solve problems, solve obstacles they encounter in their daily lives, etc..

Although these individual differences are important and large, they are never entirely consistent, since a person's intellectual performance varies from one situation to another, in different contexts, and as their behavior is judged by different criteria. The different concepts of intelligence are attempts to clarify and organize this complex set of phenomena.

Currently accepted types of intelligence

At present it is considered that people have multiple types of intelligence or personal skills, which are the following:

  • Verbal or linguistic, dealing with words and language.
  • Mathematical logic, dealing with inductive and deductive thinking, numbers, abstract patterns, and the ability to reason.
  • Visual and spatial, with a sense of balance and the ability to visualize mental images, visual thinking, etc..
  • Musical or ability to recognize tonal patterns, rhythms, melodies and tones.
  • Body kinesthetic, aptitude to use the body. It is used in the execution of sports, dances and in general in those activities where body control is essential to obtain a good performance. Own of dancers, gymnasts or mimes.
  • Interpersonal or ability of a person to understand, work and communicate with people and maintain relationships.
  • Intrapersonal, which implies self-knowledge, sensitivity to one's own values, purposes and feelings.
  • Naturalistic, it is the ability to distinguish, classify and use elements of the environment, objects, animals or plants. Both urban and suburban or rural environment.
  • Emotional Intelligence, refers to the human capacity to feel, understand, control and modify the emotional states of oneself and also of others. Emotional Intelligence does not mean stifling emotions, but directing and balancing them.
  • Creative, is the ability of the person to find solutions and have creative, imaginative and divergent thoughts with great ease.
  • Existential, this intelligence has recently been incorporated as the ninth within Howard Gardner's Multiple Intelligences, which defines it as "the ability to position oneself with respect to the cosmos and with respect to the existential features of the human condition, such as the meaning of life and death, the final destiny of the physical and psychological world in deep experiences such as love for another person ".
  • Collaborative, this is also a recently incorporated type of intelligence, used mainly in work or organizational psychology. It refers to the ability to work in a team knowing how to choose the best option to achieve the objectives during collaborative work.

Not all of these skills can be measured through a conventional psychometric test, but some of them can. The intelligences evaluated in this type of test are usually:

  • Mathematics
  • Linguistics
  • Visual spatial

And all this is studied together with other parallel skills such as:

  • Memory
  • Attention
  • Effectiveness
  • Quick response

The IQ of a person seems to have an important influence on both genetics and environmental variables. The heritability of intelligence is estimated to be between 0.4 and 0.8 on a scale of 0 to 1. If all environments were the same for everyone, the heritability would be 1 (that is, 100 %) since all the differences that could be observed would necessarily have a genetic origin. But in reality, environment and personal experiences contribute substantially to differences in intelligence test performance. Social variables such as occupation, schooling or family environment, and biological variables such as nutrition, environmental lead, alcohol or perinatal factors are important factors to take into account before conducting a study with the most impartial and objective result. possible.

How do IQ tests measure skills??

Each test has its own peculiarities, but basically they measure in the following way:

  • Mathematical logical reasoning: it is usually measured with the contents of numerical series or matrices of figures. The reasoning ability to detect the repetition periods or sequences in which numerical series are ordered is assessed. These tests measure the ability for inductive reasoning, to logically relate sets of visually coded data. Another type of test that is proposed is logical-mathematical problems. Assesses the understanding of various numerical problems, also measuring the speed and security for the numerical calculation, its reasoning and the application of numerical operations in numerical problems
  • Verbal reasoning: these are specific tests of reasoning and verbal comprehension. It evaluates the aptitude to establish analogical relations and understanding of the concepts in a certain context. It requires performing vocabulary recognition operations and recalling previous experiences or knowledge. It also measures a component of Pragmatic Intelligence, by placing the subject before statements that are valid in certain cultures and circumstances, and that require, to be understood, prior knowledge, both of language syntax and general culture.
  • Spatial reasoning: tests of fitting figures and series of objects are usually proposed, assesses the ability to visualize figures that must rotate mentally and to adapt the position, size, shape and distance on a surface. It consists of observing the facility to visualize changes in the position of figures, changes in their structures and orientation of geographic axes. The mental turn is considered a relatively easy skill to learn, although it also measures the ability to perform these turns mentally, maintaining the relationships of size, distance and relative position, to check the adequacy of a figure with the surface of which it has been visualized..
  • Auditory memory: measures the ability to retain meanings heard in a story. It is an auditory retentive, immediately after reading.
  • Visual memory: assesses retentive short-term thanks to the exposure of objects to be memorized in a limited time.
  • Attention: it evaluates the speed in the visual discrimination of pictures, words, etc., and in the comparison to find small differences between them. Quickly discriminating small visual differences is a very basic mental operation related to attentional processes of reception and comparison of visual information.
  • Speed: counts the number of responses issued in the set of six tests, regardless of whether they are correct or not. The speed of reaction to any type of stimulus, starting with the sensory ones, has been a fact that has sometimes been given excessive importance. Today more attention is paid to complex higher processes. Although the correlations that exist between the inspection time and the reaction time of a stimulus are important when measuring intelligence. In any case, we must always take into account this speed in relation to efficiency, a scale that evaluates the percentage of correct answers in the answers issued.
  • General intelligence: the general ability to establish relationships between abstract concepts is analyzed, using all your mental areas. This result generally agrees with the rest of the scores in the other sections, since it is a summary of all of them..


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