Thinking and Intelligence

Human intelligence or an ability of the abstract thinking is one of the most essential qualities of the person. A human being is a microcosm, in the form of a summary and general carrying an infinite diversity of the material world. The essence of a person as a microcosm defines the meaning of human existence, the meaning of his or her work and intellectual creativity. The meaning of human existence is not outside the person, but inside of him or her being, in the production, creation, existence and essence. The development of humanity is in the process of transformation of the natural environment, creating the second nature. It has, therefore, its external benchmarks, the development of the world in space expansion in breadth and depth. The meaning of the human existence should be presented as an infinite complexity and enrichment of the creative nature of the work and creativity of the human intelligence. The greatness and dignity of the person lies in the infinite possibilities of his or her work and intelligence.

General intelligence relates to the ability to reason inductively or deductively, use analogies, think abstractly, synthesize information, and use it to the new domains (Gottfredson, 1997). The general intelligence is frequently used synonymously with the generalfactor and it is a concealed variable that appears in a factor analysis of different cognitive tests. They are not precisely the same thing, general factor is a measure or indicator of general intelligence; it is not a general intelligence itself. As a measure of discourse ability, Cattell called this general intelligence a “fluid intelligence”, not what he called “crystallized intelligence”, which affected by general intelligence that is a measure of obtained knowledge.

The notion of general intelligence states a problem for the evolutionary psychology (Cosmides & Tooby, 2002; G. F. Miller, 2000; Chiappe & MacDonald, 2005). Evolutionary psychologists argue that the human brain composes of domain-specific cultivate psychological mechanisms, which elaborated to solve specific accommodating problems (reproduction and survival problems) in specific domains.

In contrast to views manifested by G. F. Miller (2000); Tooby and Cosmides (2002), and MacDonald and Chiappe (2005) state that general intelligence may have initially cultivated as a domain- specific adjustment to cope with the non-recurrent problems, evolutionarily novel (Kanazawa, 2004). The human brain includes numbers of domain-specific cultivated psychological mechanisms to conclude the intermittent adaptive problems. Our ancestors did not have to think in order to conclude such intermittent problems. Evolution has already performed all the thinking and constructed the human brain with the respective psychological mechanisms, which engender desires, cognitions, preferences, and emotions and induce adaptive behavior in the contexture of the ancestral environment.

The early theoretical basis of intelligence is in Charles Spearman’s (1904) two-factor intelligence model depicting specific factors and a second-order general factor. Thorndike (1924) considered intelligence as several exceptional factors, and Louis Thurstone (1938) suggested seven uncorrelated factors, each of them could be determined and depicted separately applying the Primary Mental Abilities Test. Three general intelligence factors were hypothesized by Guilford (1967) (i.e., content, operations, and products) determined by 120 particular factors, each demanding a specific test. The seminal contributions of Raymond Bernard Cattell and John Horn depicting fluid (Gf) and crystallized (Gc) intelligence were created by some as paralleling the Performance IQ (PIQ) and Verbal (VIQ) scores of the Wechsler tests. Then, multifaceted depictions of intelligence consist of Gardner’s (Karnbaber et al., 1996) multiple intelligences, Sternberg’s (1997) triarchic theory, and the Naglieri’s PASS model (Naglieri, 2009) (i.e., attention, simultaneous, planning, and successive processing).

John Carroll’s (1993) analysis and review of the huge intelligence database caused a three-layer model of cognitive abilities and human intelligence. This model is considered as the best introduction of the “structure of human cognitive abilities” owning to the power of its empirical foundation. Connecting the work of Horn and Cattell with Carroll’s depiction of intelligence, Flanagan and McGrew (1998) suggested an integrated model bases on the CHC theory that works as the groundwork for the Tests of Cognitive Abilities of Woodcock–Johnson (WJ-III; Woodcock, McGrew, & Mather, 2001) and has been used to disjunctive exegesis of the Wechsler Adult Intelligence Scale— Fourth Edition (WAIS–IV; Wechsler, 2008) and Wechsler Intelligence Scale for Children—Fourth Edition (WISC– IV; Wechsler, 2003).

Method

Participants

Twenty children (10 persons, 4 males and 6 females) were initially selected such as the young grade-one children (Yl) and kindergarten children (K). On average, young grade-one children turned to be 41 days older than kindergarten children. The March 1 is the last date to enter the school in the local district, but it is quite late by the standards in the North America. Therefore, Yl children in this research were younger when they start going to school than are the children in nearly all other school districts on the continent. Thankfully, the last date allowed assessment of the serious educational issue, namely the role of an entrance age in school on academic achievement.

All the children have spoken English as their native language, and nobody of the children had any behavioral or social problems according to the teacher reports and school records. The kindergarten curriculum in the local school system took an informal “studying as play” philosophy during the time of study with nearly no formal academic accent except for some divulgation to the letters of the alphabet. For example, no particular instruction appeared during kindergarten in studying the sounds of letters or in original consonant stripping. Two children of young grade-one group were not discerned at Posttest 2; one child’s family left the district, and the other family refused to take participation in the research. In spite of this attrition, the basic indications of the remaining sample of the young grade-one children were fundamentally unchanged.

Materials

A test of thepicture memory by Baker-Ward (1985) was exploited for the memory test. Pictures with some colored objects were cut from various magazines, glued onto the black paper, palled with a pellucid folder, and set up in a black three-ring wrapper. Four practice tests were arranged, two each with three and six pictures, accordingly. Four distinct sets of experimental tests were also created, each consisting of nine various pictures.

Three sets included 30 words and opted for the subsyllabic, phonemic, syllabic, and segmentation tasks. The task with syllabic segmented words was one, two, or three syllables in length, whereas the majority in the subsyllabic and phonemic tasks was monosyllabic and varied from three to five phonemes. Segmentation of subsyllabic words (varying from one to four words) used the simple rhyme-onset delimitation. Bisyllabic units were segmented applying the same rhyme-onset delimitation either separately within each syllable for three units (e.g., s-o-d-a) or on the second syllable for two units (e.g., i-t-em). All the words had a typical frequency indicator of at least 40 in the Davies, Richman, and Carroll (1971) norms. Finally, reading attainment scores were acquired from the children with the Wide Range Achievement Test-Revised (WRAT-R; Jastak, 1978). IQ Scores were also acquired with the Stanford-Binet Intelligence Scale-Revised (Thorndike, Hagen, & Sattler, 1986).

Procedure

All the children were checked individually in a comfortable room in the school. An experimenter said, “We are going to play a memory game. I am going to show you some pictures. When you look at each picture, I want you to study it hard because I want you to remember all the pictures that I show you. When you look at the pictures, if you do anything to help yourself remember them, say it out loud so I can write it down. Okay? Are you ready?”

Two practice tests with three pictures were given to the child; this test was trailed by two more practice tests with six pictures. Thereafter, four various sets of experimental tests were presented to the children, each of them was with nine pictures. The pictures were presented one for almost 5-7 seconds. When one picture was shown, the experimenter said the name of the depicted object. The red piece of the paper showed the end of the list. At this time, the experimenter asked the child to mention as many names that were at the pictures as he or she could. There were not given any simple rehearsal instructions; the experimenter stimulated the children to directly expatiate whatever they were doing to help them recall.

The phonological segmentation trail included a testing and training phase. During the preparation phase, children were asked to hear a word and to decide how many sounds there were in the word by putting the appropriate number of poker chips on the table. They had to say the sounds as they put the chips. If the response was wrong, the experimenter said the right response, including attendant verbalizations. Three consecutive right responses formed the criterion for advancing to the trailing phase. All children completed the training test successfully. During the trailing phase, a response was considered as correct only if the child spoke the correct number of sounds and placed the right number of chips on the table. All three segmentation tests run on separate days to decrease fatigue and other order consequences. An order of presentation of memory and language tasks was counterpoised across the participants. The trailing was led on three occasions separated by one year; three tests permitted examination of the effects of schooling on language and memory development.

Each testing was started in early September and finished by mid-October. The average age level of the groups at the first trailing was approximately 5 years, 8 months (Y1) and 5 years, 6 months (K). The groups were just 1 year older during the two subsequent trials.

Results

Background Information

The appropriate background factors were IQ, parental occupation and education, and daycare experience. There were not found statistically essential differences between the groups on any of the training variables. Two factors (daycare experience and IQ) tended to favor the young grade-one children, whereas the residing four factors facilitated the K group.

For the most part, the training variables discovered the groups to be representative of the vast population of families and schoolchildren in the area. Most parents finished a high school or they had the higher education. The mean occupational rankings varied from managerial or supervisory to secretarial positions. The IQ scores (111 and 118) were somewhat higher than waited, even for a select schoolchildren’s sample.

In conclusion, the outcome from the serial and recall serial position analyses proposed that the development of immediate memory strategies and skills is originally a function of effect to formal studying in the first grade. The same-age children going to the kindergarten demonstrated almost no improvement without such experience in memory skills and performance. Furthermore, age of child did not influence on the memory development, when taking the first grade schooling. To sum up, can be concluded that the 5-7 shift is practically a product of related experiences and schooling, at least in the restricted area of memory growth studied here.