Intelligence [lat. intellectus — understanding, understanding, comprehension] — a relatively stable structure of the individual’s mental abilities. In a number of psychological concepts, intelligence is identified with a system of mental operations, with a style and strategy for solving problems, with the effectiveness of an individual approach to a situation that requires cognitive activity, with a cognitive style, etc. In modern Western psychology, the most common understanding of intelligence is as a biopsychic adaptation to existing circumstances. life (V. Stern, J. Piaget and others).
INTELLIGENCE [lat. — intellectus, gr. — noo] — this is reason, reason, mental abilities: learn from experience, adapt to new situations, apply knowledge to control the environment or think abstractly [Enc. Britannica, 2009]; ability to creativity, fantasy, heuristic thinking (from the analysis of information to its synthesis), forecast.
Intelligence is a system of all cognitive abilities of an individual: sensations, perceptions, memory, representations, thinking, imagination. The general ability to learn and solve problems, which determines the success of any activity and underlies other abilities.
At present, intelligence is understood as the ability to carry out the process of cognition and to effectively solve problems, in particular, when mastering a new range of life tasks.
This ability is usually implemented using other abilities. Such as: the ability to cognize, learn, think logically, systematize information by analyzing it, determine its applicability (classify), find connections, patterns and differences in it, associate it with similar ones, etc.
Often this ability is characterized in relation to the tasks encountered in a person’s life. For example, in relation to the task of survival: survival is the main task of a person, the rest for him are only arising from the main, or to tasks in any area of activity.
According to Linda Gottfredson, intelligence is a very general mental ability that includes the ability to reason, plan, solve problems, think abstractly, understand complex ideas, learn quickly, and learn from experience. It’s not just reading books, narrow academic knowledge or test-taking skills. On the contrary, according to the scientist, intelligence reflects a broader and deeper ability to know the world around us, understand the essence of things and figure out what to do in a given situation.
At the beginning of the XNUMXth century, Charles Spearman showed that if a person solves some problems well, then he is successful in solving others, that is, that all intellectual abilities are statistically related. Spearman introduced the «factor g» general intelligence, showing the effectiveness of all cognitive tasks. In practice, it turned out that the «factor g» is difficult to measure directly. However, on its basis, it was possible to formulate quantities that can be measured and which represent approximate measures. g. One of these parameters is the intelligence quotient (IQ).
The Orthodox Church Fathers sometimes replaced the term νους — «mind» (Greek), close in meaning to the intellect, with the word «spirit» — πνευμα.