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  • The term "intelligence" can take on many different meanings.
    • To psychologists, intelligence is the capacity to understand the world, think rationally, and use resources effectively when faced with challenges.
    • Early psychologists interested in intelligence assumed that there was a single, general factor for mental ability, which they called g, or g-factor.
    • Some psychologists suggest that there are two different kinds of intelligence: fluid intelligence and crystallized intelligence.
        Fluid intelligence reflects information processing capabilities, reasoning, and memory.
        Crystallized intelligence is the accumulation of information, skills, and strategies.
    • Other theoreticians conceive of intelligence as encompassing even more components.
        Gardner argues that we have, at minimum, eight different forms of intelligence.
        These intelligences include musical, bodily kinesthetic, logical-mathematical, linguistic, spatial, interpersonal, intrapersonal, and naturalist.
    • Cognitive psychologists assert that the way people process information provides the most accurate measure of intelligence.
  • People with high scores on tests of intelligence spend more time on the initial encoding stages of problems.
  • The speed with which people are able to retrieve information from memory is related to verbal intelligence.







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