Intelligence is only one aspect of cognition. The concept of intelligence has proven to be quite difficult to define:
Intelligence has been defined in many different ways including as one's capacity for logic, understanding, self-awareness, learning, emotional knowledge, planning, creativity, and problem solving. It can be more generally described as the ability to perceive information, and to retain it as knowledge to be applied towards adaptive behaviors within an environment or context.
The psychometric approach focuses on individual differences in the general abilities that contribute to intelligence, which is generally measured by intelligence tests to calculate person’s intelligence quotient (IQ) that shows how the person performs relative to others of the same age.
There has since been a shift to test academic constructs such as reasoning, judging, learning, dealing with novelty and abstracting.
Howard Gardner, a theorist and researcher, recognizes the following 8 multiple intelligences:
According to Gardner, the existing measure of intelligence (such as IQ score) are limited because they place logical-mathematical and linguistic abilities on a pedestal above other abilities such as musical and interpersonal ones. He believes that by doing this, measures of intelligence show our culture’s bias in favour of logical and verbal abilities as opposed to abilities such as kinaesthetic (movement) or artistic ones and in fact even labels the first as ‘intelligence’ and the latter as ‘talent’.
It is not just Howard Gardner who views the existing measures of intelligence as overly narrow and related more to academic than real-life experiences. Most other psychologists acknowledge that people can be intelligent in different ways.
