Information Technology Reference
In-Depth Information
Fig. 1.5
Histogram of scores for card sorting. (Isaac and Connor 1978)
It is suggested from this and other experimental results that a necessary mechanism
to be engaged in problem solving and
intelligent activity is the ability to abstract
and evoke concepts; ibid the notion of insight
. However, such insights are then used
through the process of reason to generate an answer or to instigate an action. These
two mechanisms are also needed to model intelligence.
The person doing the test can see these two mechanisms of abstraction and concept
generation at work in the IQ tests, since to solve them first requires the creative act of
insight. This involves perceiving what concept might be at work given the information
so far observed and then using this concept to infer an answer. The concept, in this
example, is usually constructed from one of more dimensions such as size, color,
position, number, meaning, etc. These dimensions may also be related to the different
specializations as suggested by Thurstone's Model of Intelligence (Fig.
1.3
).
To construct concepts, a set of specialist mechanisms for generating or remember-
ing possible dimensions is required. These specializations can be exposed through
the use of Factor Analysis (a formal mathematical technique) from the way differ-
ent people perform over a range of diverse IQ tests. What Factor Analysis does is
re-express the set of observations from repeated tests as a set of independent simple
generators. These generators create values for each observed result by combining
their outputs additively. We will not cover the details of this process here.
