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When Lord Byron died in 1824, doctors discovered his brain weighed two more pounds than the average brain. This observation raised the questio: Are people with big brains smarter?
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Charles Spearman believed we had one general intelligence, a basic intelligence predicts our abilities in varied academic areas.
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Binet meausred children's mental age in order to predict school achievement. For example, a 9-year-old with a mental age of 7 would struggle with school work considered normal for their age.
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William Stern derived the famous intelligence quotient or IQ. The IQ is simply a person's mental age divided by chronological age and multiplied by 100.
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Robert Yerkes and Alfred Binet developed an intelligence test for evaluating the US military during World War I.
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Lewis Terman adapted some of Binet's original items, added others, and established new age norms. Terman extended the upper end of the test's range from teenagers to "superior adults."
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L. L. Thurstone believes that our intelligence may be broken down into seven factors: word fluency, verbal comprehension, spatial ability, perceptual speed, numerical ability, inductive reasoning, and memory.
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David Wechsler created what is now the most widely used intelligence test, the Wechsler Adult Intelligence Scale. The WAIS consists of 11 subtests broken into verbal and performance areas.
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Howard Gardner believed that our abilities are best classified into eight independent intelligences, which include a broad range of skills beyond traditional school smarts.
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Robert Sternberg believes our intelligence is best classified into three areas that predict real-world success: analytical, creative and practical.
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David Lykken found that the intelligence test scores of identical twins reared together are virtually as similar as those of the same person taking the same test twice.
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Steven Pinker argued that biological as well as social influences appear to affect gender differences in life priorities, in risk-taking, and in math reasoning and spatial abilities.
