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115-448: Intelligence has been defined in many ways: the capacity for abstraction , logic , understanding , self-awareness , learning , emotional knowledge , reasoning , planning , creativity , critical thinking , and problem-solving . It can be described as the ability to perceive or infer information ; and to retain it as knowledge to be applied to adaptive behaviors within an environment or context. The term rose to prominence during

230-416: A group , field , or category . Conceptual abstractions may be made by filtering the information content of a concept or an observable phenomenon , selecting only those aspects which are relevant for a particular purpose. For example, abstracting a leather soccer ball to the more general idea of a ball selects only the information on general ball attributes and behavior, excluding but not eliminating

345-408: A " hypersurface in a multidimensional space" to compare systems that are good at different intellectual tasks. Some skeptics believe that there is no meaningful way to define intelligence, aside from "just pointing to ourselves". Abstraction "An abstraction" is the outcome of this process — a concept that acts as a common noun for all subordinate concepts and connects any related concepts as

460-743: A concept of that feature. The notion of abstraction is important to understanding some philosophical controversies surrounding empiricism and the problem of universals . It has also recently become popular in formal logic under predicate abstraction . Another philosophical tool for the discussion of abstraction is thought space. John Locke defined abstraction in An Essay Concerning Human Understanding : 'So words are used to stand as outward marks of our internal ideas, which are taken from particular things; but if every particular idea that we take in had its own special name, there would be no end to names. To prevent this,

575-453: A detective or philosopher/scientist/engineer might seek to learn about something, at progressively deeper levels of detail, to solve a crime or a puzzle. In philosophical terminology , abstraction is the thought process wherein ideas are distanced from objects . But an idea can be symbolized . Typically, abstraction is used in the arts as a synonym for abstract art in general. Strictly speaking, it refers to art unconcerned with

690-450: A fairly high degree of intellect that varies according to each species. The same is true with arthropods . Evidence of a general factor of intelligence has been observed in non-human animals. First described in humans , the g factor has since been identified in a number of non-human species. Cognitive ability and intelligence cannot be measured using the same, largely verbally dependent, scales developed for humans. Instead, intelligence

805-465: A following in America , scientists such as Wilhelm Wundt , Herman Ebbinghaus , Mary Whiton Calkins , and William James would offer their contributions to the study of human cognition. Wilhelm Wundt (1832–1920) emphasized the notion of what he called introspection : examining the inner feelings of an individual. With introspection, the subject had to be careful with describing their feelings in

920-565: A framework (categorical concepts related to computing problems) from specific instances which implement details. This means that the program code can be written so that code does not have to depend on the specific details of supporting applications, operating system software, or hardware, but on a categorical concept of the solution. A solution to the problem can then be integrated into the system framework with minimal additional work. This allows programmers to take advantage of another programmer's work, while requiring only an abstract understanding of

1035-472: A general name that is applicable to any existing thing that fits that abstract idea.' (2.11.9) Carl Jung 's definition of abstraction broadened its scope beyond the thinking process to include exactly four mutually exclusive, different complementary psychological functions: sensation, intuition, feeling, and thinking. Together they form a structural totality of the differentiating abstraction process. Abstraction operates in one of these functions when it excludes

1150-637: A given person's intellectual performance will vary on different occasions, in different domains, as judged by different criteria. Concepts of "intelligence" are attempts to clarify and organize this complex set of phenomena. Although considerable clarity has been achieved in some areas, no such conceptualization has yet answered all the important questions, and none commands universal assent. Indeed, when two dozen prominent theorists were recently asked to define intelligence, they gave two dozen, somewhat different, definitions. Psychologists and learning researchers also have suggested definitions of intelligence such as

1265-448: A material process. Alfred Sohn-Rethel (1899–1990) asked: "Can there be abstraction other than by thought?" He used the example of commodity abstraction to show that abstraction occurs in practice as people create systems of abstract exchange that extend beyond the immediate physicality of the object and yet have real and immediate consequences. This work was extended through the 'Constitutive Abstraction' approach of writers associated with

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1380-528: A measure of intelligence as a whole. There is debate about the heritability of IQ , that is, what proportion of differences in IQ test performance between individuals are explained by genetic or environmental factors. The scientific consensus is that genetics does not explain average differences in IQ test performance between racial groups. Emotional intelligence is thought to be the ability to convey emotion to others in an understandable way as well as to read

1495-463: A number of variables that may have affected his ability to learn and recall the non-words he created. One of the reasons, he concluded, was the amount of time between the presentation of the list of stimuli and the recitation or recall of the same. Ebbinghaus was the first to record and plot a " learning curve " and a " forgetting curve ". His work heavily influenced the study of serial position and its effect on memory Mary Whiton Calkins (1863–1930)

1610-415: A particular species , and comparing abilities between species. They study various measures of problem solving, as well as numerical and verbal reasoning abilities. Some challenges include defining intelligence so it has the same meaning across species, and operationalizing a measure that accurately compares mental ability across species and contexts. Wolfgang Köhler 's research on the intelligence of apes

1725-496: A particular place and time. However, in the secondary sense of the term 'abstraction', this physical object can carry materially abstracting processes. For example, record-keeping aids throughout the Fertile Crescent included calculi (clay spheres, cones, etc.) which represented counts of items, probably livestock or grains, sealed in containers. According to Schmandt-Besserat 1981 , these clay containers contained tokens,

1840-551: A particular property (e.g., good ). Questions about the properties of things are then propositions about predicates, which propositions remain to be evaluated by the investigator. In the graph 1 below , the graphical relationships like the arrows joining boxes and ellipses might denote predicates. Abstractions sometimes have ambiguous referents . For example, " happiness " can mean experiencing various positive emotions, but can also refer to life satisfaction and subjective well-being . Likewise, " architecture " refers not only to

1955-401: A philosophical approach to the study of cognition and the mind, with his Meditations he wanted people to meditate along with him to come to the same conclusions as he did but in their own free cognition. In psychology , the term "cognition" is usually used within an information processing view of an individual's psychological functions , and such is the same in cognitive engineering . In

2070-439: A specific cat, to semantic abstractions such as the "idea" of a CAT, to classes of objects such as "mammals" and even categories such as " object " as opposed to "action". Non-existent things in any particular place and time are often seen as abstract. By contrast, instances, or members, of such an abstract thing might exist in many different places and times. Those abstract things are then said to be multiply instantiated , in

2185-554: Is an elementary methodological tool in several disciplines of social science. These disciplines have definite and different concepts of "man" that highlight those aspects of man and his behaviour by idealization that are relevant for the given human science . For example, homo sociologicus is the man as sociology abstracts and idealizes it, depicting man as a social being. Moreover, we could talk about homo cyber sapiens (the man who can extend his biologically determined intelligence thanks to new technologies), or homo creativus (who

2300-635: Is an example of research in this area, as is Stanley Coren's book, The Intelligence of Dogs . Non-human animals particularly noted and studied for their intelligence include chimpanzees , bonobos (notably the language-using Kanzi ) and other great apes , dolphins , elephants and to some extent parrots , rats and ravens . Cephalopod intelligence provides an important comparative study. Cephalopods appear to exhibit characteristics of significant intelligence, yet their nervous systems differ radically from those of backboned animals. Vertebrates such as mammals , birds , reptiles and fish have shown

2415-676: Is an important aspect of metacognition. Aerobic and anaerobic exercise have been studied concerning cognitive improvement. There appear to be short-term increases in attention span, verbal and visual memory in some studies. However, the effects are transient and diminish over time, after cessation of the physical activity. People with Parkinson's disease has also seen improved cognition while cycling, while pairing it with other cognitive tasks. Studies evaluating phytoestrogen , blueberry supplementation and antioxidants showed minor increases in cognitive function after supplementation but no significant effects compared to placebo . Another study on

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2530-574: Is called artificial intelligence . The word intelligence derives from the Latin nouns intelligentia or intellēctus , which in turn stem from the verb intelligere , to comprehend or perceive. In the Middle Ages , the word intellectus became the scholarly technical term for understanding and a translation for the Greek philosophical term nous . This term, however, was strongly linked to

2645-419: Is closely related to the aforementioned study and conclusion of the memory experiments conducted by Hermann Ebbinghaus. William James (1842–1910) is another pivotal figure in the history of cognitive science. James was quite discontent with Wundt's emphasis on introspection and Ebbinghaus' use of nonsense stimuli. He instead chose to focus on the human learning experience in everyday life and its importance to

2760-532: Is debate as to whether or not these studies and social intelligence come from the same theories or if there is a distinction between them, and they are generally thought to be of two different schools of thought . Moral intelligence is the capacity to understand right from wrong and to behave based on the value that is believed to be right. It is considered a distinct form of intelligence, independent to both emotional and cognitive intelligence. Concepts of "book smarts" and "street smart" are contrasting views based on

2875-450: Is different from learning . Learning refers to the act of retaining facts and information or abilities and being able to recall them for future use. Intelligence, on the other hand, is the cognitive ability of someone to perform these and other processes. There have been various attempts to quantify intelligence via psychometric testing. Prominent among these are the various Intelligence Quotient (IQ) tests, which were first developed in

2990-518: Is gathered through observation and conscientious experimentation. Two millennia later, the groundwork for modern concepts of cognition was laid during the Enlightenment by thinkers such as John Locke and Dugald Stewart who sought to develop a model of the mind in which ideas were acquired, remembered and manipulated. During the early nineteenth century cognitive models were developed both in philosophy —particularly by authors writing about

3105-415: Is learned first still has to go through a retrieval process. This experiment focuses on human memory processes. The word superiority effect experiment presents a subject with a word, or a letter by itself, for a brief period of time, i.e. 40 ms, and they are then asked to recall the letter that was in a particular location in the word. In theory, the subject should be better able to correctly recall

3220-781: Is measured using a variety of interactive and observational tools focusing on innovation , habit reversal, social learning , and responses to novelty . Studies have shown that g is responsible for 47% of the individual variance in cognitive ability measures in primates and between 55% and 60% of the variance in mice (Locurto, Locurto). These values are similar to the accepted variance in IQ explained by g in humans (40–50%). It has been argued that plants should also be classified as intelligent based on their ability to sense and model external and internal environments and adjust their morphology , physiology and phenotype accordingly to ensure self-preservation and reproduction. A counter argument

3335-469: Is now constitutively and materially more abstract than at the time when princes ruled as the embodiment of extended power'. The way that physical objects, like rocks and trees, have being differs from the way that properties of abstract concepts or relations have being, for example the way the concrete , particular , individuals pictured in picture 1 exist differs from the way the concepts illustrated in graph 1 exist. That difference accounts for

3450-550: Is perhaps surprising how utterly dismissive we tend to be of it. It is sometimes derided as being merely "book knowledge", and having it is being "book smart". In contrast, knowledge acquired through direct experience and apprenticeship is called "street knowledge", and having it is being "street smart". Although humans have been the primary focus of intelligence researchers, scientists have also attempted to investigate animal intelligence, or more broadly, animal cognition. These researchers are interested in studying both mental ability in

3565-426: Is simply creative). Abstraction (combined with Weberian idealization ) plays a crucial role in economics - hence abstractions such as "the market" and the generalized concept of " business ". Breaking away from directly experienced reality was a common trend in 19th-century sciences (especially physics ), and this was the effort which fundamentally determined the way economics tried (and still tries) to approach

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3680-456: Is sometimes defined as the "capacity to learn how to carry out a huge range of tasks". Mathematician Olle Häggström defines intelligence in terms of "optimization power", an agent's capacity for efficient cross-domain optimization of the world according to the agent's preferences, or more simply the ability to "steer the future into regions of possibility ranked high in a preference ordering". In this optimization framework, Deep Blue has

3795-471: Is that highly abstract concepts are more difficult to learn, and might require a degree of mathematical maturity and experience before they can be assimilated. In music, the term abstraction can be used to describe improvisatory approaches to interpretation, and may sometimes indicate abandonment of tonality . Atonal music has no key signature, and is characterized by the exploration of internal numeric relationships. A recent meta-analysis suggests that

3910-788: Is that intelligence is commonly understood to involve the creation and use of persistent memories as opposed to computation that does not involve learning. If this is accepted as definitive of intelligence, then it includes the artificial intelligence of robots capable of "machine learning", but excludes those purely autonomic sense-reaction responses that can be observed in many plants. Plants are not limited to automated sensory-motor responses, however, they are capable of discriminating positive and negative experiences and of "learning" (registering memories) from their past experiences. They are also capable of communication, accurately computing their circumstances, using sophisticated cost–benefit analysis and taking tightly controlled actions to mitigate and control

4025-435: Is the ability to understand the social cues and motivations of others and oneself in social situations. It is thought to be distinct to other types of intelligence, but has relations to emotional intelligence. Social intelligence has coincided with other studies that focus on how we make judgements of others, the accuracy with which we do so, and why people would be viewed as having positive or negative social character . There

4140-464: Is the opposite of specification , which is the analysis or breaking-down of a general idea or abstraction into concrete facts. Abstraction can be illustrated by Francis Bacon 's Novum Organum (1620), a book of modern scientific philosophy written in the late Jacobean era of England to encourage modern thinkers to collect specific facts before making any generalizations. Bacon used and promoted induction as an abstraction tool; it complemented but

4255-414: Is the theory of General Intelligence, or g factor . The g factor is a construct that summarizes the correlations observed between an individual's scores on a range of cognitive tests. Today, most psychologists agree that IQ measures at least some aspects of human intelligence, particularly the ability to thrive in an academic context. However, many psychologists question the validity of IQ tests as

4370-426: Is the time it takes for a participant to identify whether a green circle is present or not, should not change as the number of distractors increases. Conjunctive searches where the target is absent should have a longer reaction time than the conjunctive searches where the target is present. The theory is that in feature searches, it is easy to spot the target, or if it is absent, because of the difference in color between

4485-439: Is the ultimate and common feature of all bodies. Neoclassical economists created the indefinitely abstract notion of homo economicus by following the same procedure. Economists abstract from all individual and personal qualities in order to get to those characteristics that embody the essence of economic activity. Eventually, it is the substance of the economic man that they try to grasp. Any characteristic beyond it only disturbs

4600-484: The Shared intentionality approach, the mother shares the essential sensory stimulus of the actual cognitive problem with the child. By sharing this stimulus, the mother provides a template for developing the young organism's nervous system. Recent findings in research on child cognitive development and advances in inter-brain neuroscience experiments have made the above proposition plausible. Based on them,

4715-465: The agent and CAT:Elsie depicts an example of an is-a relationship, as does the arrow between the location and the MAT . The arrows between the gerund / present participle SITTING and the nouns agent and location express the diagram 's basic relationship; "agent is SITTING on location" ; Elsie is an instance of CAT . Although the description sitting-on (graph 1) is more abstract than

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4830-408: The commodity abstraction recognizes a parallel process. The state (polity) as both concept and material practice exemplifies the two sides of this process of abstraction. Conceptually, 'the current concept of the state is an abstraction from the much more concrete early-modern use as the standing or status of the prince, his visible estates'. At the same time, materially, the 'practice of statehood

4945-407: The human brain suggests that the left and right hemispheres differ in their handling of abstraction. For example, one meta-analysis reviewing human brain lesions has shown a left hemisphere bias during tool usage. Abstraction in philosophy is the process (or, to some, the alleged process) in concept formation of recognizing some set of common features in individuals , and on that basis forming

5060-657: The metaphysical and cosmological theories of teleological scholasticism , including theories of the immortality of the soul, and the concept of the active intellect (also known as the active intelligence). This approach to the study of nature was strongly rejected by early modern philosophers such as Francis Bacon , Thomas Hobbes , John Locke , and David Hume , all of whom preferred "understanding" (in place of " intellectus " or "intelligence") in their English philosophical works. Hobbes for example, in his Latin De Corpore , used " intellectus intelligit ", translated in

5175-409: The ontological usefulness of the word "abstract". The word applies to properties and relations to mark the fact that, if they exist, they do not exist in space or time, but that instances of them can exist, potentially in many different places and times. A physical object (a possible referent of a concept or word) is considered concrete (not abstract) if it is a particular individual that occupies

5290-509: The philosophy of mind —and within medicine , especially by physicians seeking to understand how to cure madness. In Britain , these models were studied in the academy by scholars such as James Sully at University College London , and they were even used by politicians when considering the national Elementary Education Act 1870 ( 33 & 34 Vict. c. 75). As psychology emerged as a burgeoning field of study in Europe , whilst also gaining

5405-418: The psychological construct of Shared intentionality , highlighting its contribution to cognitive development from birth. This primary interaction provides unaware collaboration in mother-child dyads for environmental learning. Later, Igor Val Danilov developed this notion, expanding it to the intrauterine period and clarifying the neurophysiological processes underlying Shared intentionality . According to

5520-712: The shared intentionality hypothesis introduced the notion of pre-perceptual communication in the mother-fetus communication model due to nonlocal neuronal coupling. This nonlocal coupling model refers to communication between two organisms through the copying of the adequate ecological dynamics by biological systems indwelling one environmental context, where a naive actor (Fetus) replicates information from an experienced actor (Mother) due to intrinsic processes of these dynamic systems ( embodied information ) but without interacting through sensory signals. The Mother's heartbeats (a low-frequency oscillator) modulate relevant local neuronal networks in specific subsystems of both her and

5635-468: The 15th century, where it meant " thinking and awareness". The term comes from the Latin noun cognitio ('examination', 'learning', or 'knowledge'), derived from the verb cognosco , a compound of con ('with') and gnōscō ('know'). The latter half, gnōscō , itself is a cognate of a Greek verb, gi(g)nósko ( γι(γ)νώσκω , 'I know,' or 'perceive'). Despite

5750-487: The English version as "the understanding understandeth", as a typical example of a logical absurdity . "Intelligence" has therefore become less common in English language philosophy, but it has later been taken up (with the scholastic theories that it now implies) in more contemporary psychology . There is controversy over how to define intelligence. Scholars describe its constituent abilities in various ways, and differ in

5865-841: The Journal Arena . Two books that have taken this theme of the abstraction of social relations as an organizing process in human history are Nation Formation: Towards a Theory of Abstract Community (1996) and an associated volume published in 2006, Globalism, Nationalism, Tribalism: Bringing Theory Back In . These books argue that a nation is an abstract community bringing together strangers who will never meet as such; thus constituting materially real and substantial, but abstracted and mediated relations. The books suggest that contemporary processes of globalization and mediatization have contributed to materially abstracting relations between people, with major consequences for how humans live their lives . One can readily argue that abstraction

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5980-412: The abstract requires an intuitive or common experience between the communicator and the communication recipient. This is true for all verbal/abstract communication. For example, many different things can be red . Likewise, many things sit on surfaces (as in picture 1 , to the right). The property of redness and the relation sitting-on are therefore abstractions of those objects. Specifically,

6095-455: The acquisition and development of cognitive capabilities. Human cognition is conscious and unconscious , concrete or abstract , as well as intuitive (like knowledge of a language) and conceptual (like a model of a language). It encompasses processes such as memory , association , concept formation , pattern recognition , language , attention , perception , action , problem solving , and mental imagery . Traditionally, emotion

6210-572: The approach of abstraction (going from particular facts collected into one general idea). Newton (1642–1727) derived the motion of the planets from Copernicus ' (1473–1543) simplification, that the Sun is the center of the Solar System ; Kepler (1571–1630) compressed thousands of measurements into one expression to finally conclude that Mars moves in an elliptical orbit about the Sun; Galileo (1564–1642) repeated one hundred specific experiments into

6325-420: The beginning of cognition is memory storage about the relevant ecological dynamics by the naive nervous system (i.e., memorizing the ecological condition of relevant sensory stimulus) at the molecular level – an engram . Evidence derived using optical imaging , molecular-genetic and optogenetic techniques in conjunction with appropriate behavioural analyses continues to offer support for the idea that changing

6440-451: The beginning of the sequence, called the primacy effect , and information at the end of the sequence, called the recency effect . Consequently, information given in the middle of the sequence is typically forgotten, or not recalled as easily. This study predicts that the recency effect is stronger than the primacy effect, because the information that is most recently learned is still in working memory when asked to be recalled. Information that

6555-532: The cognitive abilities to learn , form concepts , understand , and reason , including the capacities to recognize patterns , innovate, plan , solve problems , and employ language to communicate . These cognitive abilities can be organized into frameworks like fluid vs. crystallized and the Unified Cattell-Horn-Carroll model, which contains abilities like fluid reasoning, perceptual speed, verbal abilities, and others. Intelligence

6670-427: The color red . That definition, however, suffers from the difficulty of deciding which things are real (i.e. which things exist in reality). For example, it is difficult to agree to whether concepts like God , the number three , and goodness are real, abstract, or both. An approach to resolving such difficulty is to use predicates as a general term for whether things are variously real, abstract, concrete, or of

6785-561: The concept "cat" or the concept "telephone". Although the concepts "cat" and "telephone" are abstractions , they are not abstract in the sense of the objects in graph 1 below . We might look at other graphs, in a progression from cat to mammal to animal , and see that animal is more abstract than mammal ; but on the other hand mammal is a harder idea to express, certainly in relation to marsupial or monotreme . Perhaps confusingly, some philosophies refer to tropes (instances of properties) as abstract particulars —e.g.,

6900-414: The conceptual diagram graph 1 identifies only three boxes, two ellipses, and four arrows (and their five labels), whereas the picture 1 shows much more pictorial detail, with the scores of implied relationships as implicit in the picture rather than with the nine explicit details in the graph. Graph 1 details some explicit relationships between the objects of the diagram. For example, the arrow between

7015-410: The construction of human thought or mental processes. Jean Piaget was one of the most important and influential people in the field of developmental psychology . He believed that humans are unique in comparison to animals because we have the capacity to do "abstract symbolic reasoning". His work can be compared to Lev Vygotsky , Sigmund Freud , and Erik Erikson who were also great contributors in

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7130-407: The construction of human thought or mental processes. Research shows the intentional engagement of fetuses with the environment, demonstrating cognitive achievements. However, organisms with simple reflexes cannot cognize the environment alone because the environment is the cacophony of stimuli (electromagnetic waves, chemical interactions, and pressure fluctuations). Their sensation is too limited by

7245-708: The degree to which they conceive of intelligence as quantifiable. A consensus report called Intelligence: Knowns and Unknowns , published in 1995 by the Board of Scientific Affairs of the American Psychological Association , states: Individuals differ from one another in their ability to understand complex ideas, to adapt effectively to the environment, to learn from experience, to engage in various forms of reasoning, to overcome obstacles by taking thought. Although these individual differences can be substantial, they are never entirely consistent:

7360-456: The design of safe, functional buildings, but also to elements of creation and innovation which aim at elegant solutions to construction problems, to the use of space, and to the attempt to evoke an emotional response in the builders, owners, viewers and users of the building. Abstraction uses a strategy of simplification, wherein formerly concrete details are left ambiguous, vague, or undefined; thus effective communication about things in

7475-716: The disciplines of cognitive science . Metacognition is an awareness of one's thought processes and an understanding of the patterns behind them. The term comes from the root word meta , meaning "beyond", or "on top of". Metacognition can take many forms, such as reflecting on one's ways of thinking, and knowing when and how oneself and others use particular strategies for problem-solving . There are generally two components of metacognition: (1) cognitive conceptions and (2) cognitive regulation system. Research has shown that both components of metacognition play key roles in metaconceptual knowledge and learning. Metamemory , defined as knowing about memory and mnemonic strategies,

7590-442: The distinction between "abstract" and " concrete ". In this sense the process of abstraction entails the identification of similarities between objects, and the process of associating these objects with an abstraction (which is itself an object ). Chains of abstractions can be construed , moving from neural impulses arising from sensory perception to basic abstractions such as color or shape , to experiential abstractions such as

7705-498: The distractor task, they are asked to recall the trigram from before the distractor task. In theory, the longer the distractor task, the harder it will be for participants to correctly recall the trigram. This experiment focuses on human short-term memory . During the memory span experiment , each subject is presented with a sequence of stimuli of the same kind; words depicting objects, numbers, letters that sound similar, and letters that sound dissimilar. After being presented with

7820-864: The diverse environmental stressors. Scholars studying artificial intelligence have proposed definitions of intelligence that include the intelligence demonstrated by machines. Some of these definitions are meant to be general enough to encompass human and other animal intelligence as well. An intelligent agent can be defined as a system that perceives its environment and takes actions which maximize its chances of success. Kaplan and Haenlein define artificial intelligence as "a system's ability to correctly interpret external data, to learn from such data, and to use those learnings to achieve specific goals and tasks through flexible adaptation". Progress in artificial intelligence can be demonstrated in benchmarks ranging from games to practical tasks such as protein folding . Existing AI lags humans in terms of general intelligence, which

7935-424: The early 1900s. Most psychologists believe that intelligence can be divided into various domains or competencies. Intelligence has been long-studied in humans , and across numerous disciplines. It has also been observed in the cognition of non-human animals . Some researchers have suggested that plants exhibit forms of intelligence, though this remains controversial. Intelligence in computers or other machines

8050-445: The early 20th century to screen children for intellectual disability . Over time, IQ tests became more pervasive, being used to screen immigrants, military recruits, and job applicants. As the tests became more popular, belief that IQ tests measure a fundamental and unchanging attribute that all humans possess became widespread. An influential theory that promoted the idea that IQ measures a fundamental quality possessed by every person

8165-452: The economic aspects of social life. It is abstraction we meet in the case of both Newton's physics and the neoclassical theory, since the goal was to grasp the unchangeable and timeless essence of phenomena. For example, Newton created the concept of the material point by following the abstraction method so that he abstracted from the dimension and shape of any perceptible object, preserving only inertial and translational motion. Material point

8280-402: The effects of herbal and dietary supplements on cognition in menopause show that soy and Ginkgo biloba supplementation could improve women's cognition. Exposing individuals with cognitive impairment (i.e. dementia ) to daily activities designed to stimulate thinking and memory in a social setting, seems to improve cognition. Although study materials are small, and larger studies need to confirm

8395-440: The emotions of others accurately. Some theories imply that a heightened emotional intelligence could also lead to faster generating and processing of emotions in addition to the accuracy. In addition, higher emotional intelligence is thought to help us manage emotions, which is beneficial for our problem-solving skills. Emotional intelligence is important to our mental health and has ties to social intelligence. Social intelligence

8510-488: The field of developmental psychology. Piaget is known for studying the cognitive development in children, having studied his own three children and their intellectual development, from which he would come to a theory of cognitive development that describes the developmental stages of childhood. Studies on cognitive development have also been conducted in children beginning from the embryonal period to understand when cognition appears and what environmental attributes stimulate

8625-439: The fields of linguistics , musicology , anesthesia , neuroscience , psychiatry , psychology , education , philosophy , anthropology , biology , systemics , logic , and computer science . These and other approaches to the analysis of cognition (such as embodied cognition ) are synthesized in the developing field of cognitive science , a progressively autonomous academic discipline . The word cognition dates back to

8740-615: The following: "Intelligence is a force, F, that acts so as to maximize future freedom of action. It acts to maximize future freedom of action, or keep options open, with some strength T, with the diversity of possible accessible futures, S, up to some future time horizon, τ. In short, intelligence doesn't like to get trapped". Human intelligence is the intellectual power of humans, which is marked by complex cognitive feats and high levels of motivation and self-awareness . Intelligence enables humans to remember descriptions of things and use those descriptions in future behaviors. It gives humans

8855-475: The function and capacity of human memory. Ebbinghaus developed his own experiment in which he constructed over 2,000 syllables made out of nonexistent words (for instance, 'EAS'). He then examined his own personal ability to learn these non-words. He purposely chose non-words as opposed to real words to control for the influence of pre-existing experience on what the words might symbolize, thus enabling easier recollection of them. Ebbinghaus observed and hypothesized

8970-727: The functioning of this essential core. Cognition Cognition is the "mental action or process of acquiring knowledge and understanding through thought, experience, and the senses". It encompasses all aspects of intellectual functions and processes such as: perception , attention , thought , imagination , intelligence , the formation of knowledge , memory and working memory , judgment and evaluation , reasoning and computation , problem-solving and decision-making , comprehension and production of language . Cognitive processes use existing knowledge to discover new knowledge. Cognitive processes are analyzed from different perspectives within different contexts, notably in

9085-642: The graphic image of a cat sitting on a mat (picture 1), the delineation of abstract things from concrete things is somewhat ambiguous; this ambiguity or vagueness is characteristic of abstraction. Thus something as simple as a newspaper might be specified to six levels, as in Douglas Hofstadter 's illustration of that ambiguity, with a progression from abstract to concrete in Gödel, Escher, Bach (1979): An abstraction can thus encapsulate each of these levels of detail with no loss of generality . But perhaps

9200-579: The implementation of another's work, apart from the problem that it solves. Abstractions and levels of abstraction play an important role in the theory of general semantics originated by Alfred Korzybski . Anatol Rapoport wrote "Abstracting is a mechanism by which an infinite variety of experiences can be mapped on short noises (words)." Francis Fukuyama defines history as "a deliberate attempt of abstraction in which we separate out important from unimportant events". Researchers in linguistics frequently apply abstraction so as to allow an analysis of

9315-436: The key traits in modern human behaviour , which is believed to have developed between 50,000 and 100,000 years ago. Its development is likely to have been closely connected with the development of human language , which (whether spoken or written) appears to both involve and facilitate abstract thinking. Abstraction involves induction of ideas or the synthesis of particular facts into one general theory about something. It

9430-427: The law of falling bodies. An abstraction can be seen as a compression process, mapping multiple different pieces of constituent data to a single piece of abstract data; based on similarities in the constituent data, for example, many different physical cats map to the abstraction "CAT". This conceptual scheme emphasizes the inherent equality of both constituent and abstract data, thus avoiding problems arising from

9545-506: The letter when it was presented in a word than when it was presented in isolation. This experiment focuses on human speech and language. In the Brown–Peterson cohomology experiment , participants are briefly presented with a trigram and in one particular version of the experiment, they are then given a distractor task, asking them to identify whether a sequence of words is in fact words, or non-words (due to being misspelled, etc.). After

9660-577: The literal depiction of things from the visible world—it can, however, refer to an object or image which has been distilled from the real world, or indeed, another work of art. Artwork that reshapes the natural world for expressive purposes is called abstract; that which derives from, but does not imitate a recognizable subject is called nonobjective abstraction. In the 20th century the trend toward abstraction coincided with advances in science, technology, and changes in urban life, eventually reflecting an interest in psychoanalytic theory. Later still, abstraction

9775-432: The mind makes particular ideas received from particular things become general; which it does by considering them as they are in the mind—mental appearances—separate from all other existences, and from the circumstances of real existence, such as time, place, and so on. This procedure is called abstraction. In it, an idea taken from a particular thing becomes a general representative of all of the same kind, and its name becomes

9890-404: The mind. The development of Cognitive psychology arose as psychology from different theories, and so began exploring these dynamics concerning mind and environment, starting a movement from these prior dualist paradigms that prioritized cognition as systematic computation or exclusively behavior. For years, sociologists and psychologists have conducted studies on cognitive development , i.e.

10005-411: The most objective manner possible in order for Wundt to find the information scientific. Though Wundt's contributions are by no means minimal, modern psychologists find his methods to be too subjective and choose to rely on more objective procedures of experimentation to make conclusions about the human cognitive process. Hermann Ebbinghaus (1850–1909) conducted cognitive studies that mainly examined

10120-514: The nervous system of the fetus due to the effect of the interference of the low-frequency oscillator (Mother heartbeats) and already exhibited gamma activity in these neuronal networks (interference in physics is the combination of two or more electromagnetic waveforms to form a resultant wave). Therefore, the subliminal perception in a fetus emerges due to Shared intentionality with the mother that stimulates cognition in this organism even before birth. Another crucial question in understanding

10235-456: The noise to solve the cue problem–the relevant stimulus cannot overcome the noise magnitude if it passes through the senses (see the binding problem ). Fetuses need external help to stimulate their nervous system in choosing the relevant sensory stimulus for grasping the perception of objects. The Shared intentionality approach proposes a plausible explanation of perception development in this earlier stage. Initially, Michael Tomasello introduced

10350-783: The oldest paradigms is the leveling and sharpening of stories as they are repeated from memory studied by Bartlett . The semantic differential used factor analysis to determine the main meanings of words, finding that the ethical value of words is the first factor. More controlled experiments examine the categorical relationships of words in free recall . The hierarchical structure of words has been explicitly mapped in George Miller 's WordNet . More dynamic models of semantic networks have been created and tested with computational systems such as neural networks , latent semantic analysis (LSA), Bayesian analysis , and multidimensional factor analysis. The meanings of words are studied by all

10465-407: The other phenomenal and cognitive characteristics of that particular ball. In a type–token distinction , a type (e.g., a 'ball') is more abstract than its tokens (e.g., 'that leather soccer ball'). Abstraction in its secondary use is a material process , discussed in the themes below . Thinking in abstractions is considered by anthropologists , archaeologists , and sociologists to be one of

10580-426: The particular redness of a particular apple is an abstract particular . This is similar to qualia and sumbebekos . Still retaining the primary meaning of ' abstrere ' or 'to draw away from', the abstraction of money, for example, works by drawing away from the particular value of things allowing completely incommensurate objects to be compared (see the section on 'Physicality' below). Karl Marx 's writing on

10695-503: The phenomena of language at the desired level of detail. A commonly used abstraction, the phoneme , abstracts speech sounds in such a way as to neglect details that cannot serve to differentiate meaning. Other analogous kinds of abstractions (sometimes called " emic units ") considered by linguists include morphemes , graphemes , and lexemes . Abstraction also arises in the relation between syntax , semantics , and pragmatics . Pragmatics involves considerations that make reference to

10810-428: The power to "steer a chessboard's future into a subspace of possibility which it labels as 'winning', despite attempts by Garry Kasparov to steer the future elsewhere." Hutter and Legg , after surveying the literature, define intelligence as "an agent's ability to achieve goals in a wide range of environments". While cognitive ability is sometimes measured as a one-dimensional parameter, it could also be represented as

10925-478: The premise that some people have knowledge gained through academic study, but may lack the experience to sensibly apply that knowledge, while others have knowledge gained through practical experience, but may lack accurate information usually gained through study by which to effectively apply that knowledge. Artificial intelligence researcher Hector Levesque has noted that: Given the importance of learning through text in our own personal lives and in our culture, it

11040-423: The rational, logical qualities ... Abstract feeling does the same with ... its feeling-values. ... I put abstract feelings on the same level as abstract thoughts. ... Abstract sensation would be aesthetic as opposed to sensuous sensation and abstract intuition would be symbolic as opposed to fantastic intuition . (Jung, [1921] (1971): par. 678). Social theorists deal with abstraction both as an ideational and as

11155-484: The results, the effect of social cognitive stimulation seems to be larger than the effects of some drug treatments. Transcranial magnetic stimulation (TMS) has been shown to improve cognition in individuals without dementia 1 month after treatment session compared to before treatment. The effect was not significantly larger compared to placebo. Computerized cognitive training, utilizing a computer based training regime for different cognitive functions has been examined in

11270-412: The same for letters that sound dissimilar and short words. The memory span is projected to be shorter with letters that sound similar and with longer words. In one version of the visual search experiment , a participant is presented with a window that displays circles and squares scattered across it. The participant is to identify whether there is a green circle on the window. In the featured search,

11385-411: The sense of picture 1 , picture 2 , etc., shown below . It is not sufficient, however, to define abstract ideas as those that can be instantiated and to define abstraction as the movement in the opposite direction to instantiation. Doing so would make the concepts "cat" and "telephone" abstract ideas since despite their varying appearances, a particular cat or a particular telephone is an instance of

11500-502: The simultaneous influence of the other functions and other irrelevancies, such as emotion. Abstraction requires selective use of this structural split of abilities in the psyche. The opposite of abstraction is concretism . Abstraction is one of Jung's 57 definitions in Chapter XI of Psychological Types . There is an abstract thinking , just as there is abstract feeling , sensation and intuition . Abstract thinking singles out

11615-407: The stimuli, the subject is asked to recall the sequence of stimuli that they were given in the exact order in which it was given. In one particular version of the experiment, if the subject recalled a list correctly, the list length was increased by one for that type of material, and vice versa if it was recalled incorrectly. The theory is that people have a memory span of about seven items for numbers,

11730-448: The strength of connections between neurons is one of the major mechanisms by which engrams are stored in the brain. Two (or more) possible mechanisms of cognition can involve both quantum effects and synchronization of brain structures due to electromagnetic interference. The Serial-position effect is meant to test a theory of memory that states that when information is given in a serial manner, we tend to remember information at

11845-400: The study of social cognition , a branch of social psychology , the term is used to explain attitudes , attribution , and group dynamics . However, psychological research within the field of cognitive science has also suggested an embodied approach to understanding cognition. Contrary to the traditional computationalist approach, embodied cognition emphasizes the body's significant role in

11960-410: The study of cognition. James' most significant contribution to the study and theory of cognition was his textbook Principles of Psychology which preliminarily examines aspects of cognition such as perception, memory, reasoning, and attention. René Descartes (1596–1650) was a seventeenth-century philosopher who came up with the phrase "Cogito, ergo sum", which means "I think, therefore I am." He took

12075-414: The subject is presented with several trial windows that have blue squares or circles and one green circle or no green circle in it at all. In the conjunctive search, the subject is presented with trial windows that have blue circles or green squares and a present or absent green circle whose presence the participant is asked to identify. What is expected is that in the feature searches, reaction time, that

12190-536: The target and the distractors. In conjunctive searches where the target is absent, reaction time increases because the subject has to look at each shape to determine whether it is the target or not because some of the distractors if not all of them, are the same color as the target stimuli. Conjunctive searches where the target is present take less time because if the target is found, the search between each shape stops. The semantic network of knowledge representation systems have been studied in various paradigms. One of

12305-577: The total of which were the count of objects being transferred. The containers thus served as something of a bill of lading or an accounts book. In order to avoid breaking open the containers for the count, marks were placed on the outside of the containers. These physical marks, in other words, acted as material abstractions of a materially abstract process of accounting, using conceptual abstractions (numbers) to communicate its meaning. Abstract things are sometimes defined as those things that do not exist in reality or exist only as sensory experiences, like

12420-677: The user of the language; semantics considers expressions and what they denote (the designata ) abstracted from the language user; and syntax considers only the expressions themselves, abstracted from the designata. Abstraction in mathematics is the process of extracting the underlying structures, patterns or properties of a mathematical concept or object, removing any dependence on real-world objects with which it might originally have been connected, and generalizing it so that it has wider applications or matching among other abstract descriptions of equivalent phenomena. The advantages of abstraction in mathematics are: The main disadvantage of abstraction

12535-424: The verbal system has a greater engagement with abstract concepts when the perceptual system is more engaged in processing concrete concepts. This is because abstract concepts elicit greater brain activity in the inferior frontal gyrus and middle temporal gyrus compared to concrete concepts which elicit greater activity in the posterior cingulate, precuneus, fusiform gyrus, and parahippocampal gyrus. Other research into

12650-497: The word cognitive itself dating back to the 15th century, attention to cognitive processes came about more than eighteen centuries earlier, beginning with Aristotle (384–322 BCE) and his interest in the inner workings of the mind and how they affect the human experience. Aristotle focused on cognitive areas pertaining to memory, perception, and mental imagery. He placed great importance on ensuring that his studies were based on empirical evidence, that is, scientific information that

12765-547: Was a movement known as cognitivism in the 1950s, emerging after the Behaviorist movement viewed cognition as a form of behavior. Cognitivism approached cognition as a form of computation, viewing the mind as a machine and consciousness as an executive function. However; post cognitivism began to emerge in the 1990s as the development of cognitive science presented theories that highlighted the necessity of cognitive action as embodied, extended, and producing dynamic processes in

12880-419: Was an influential American pioneer in the realm of psychology. Her work also focused on human memory capacity. A common theory, called the recency effect , can be attributed to the studies that she conducted. The recency effect, also discussed in the subsequent experiment section, is the tendency for individuals to be able to accurately recollect the final items presented in a sequence of stimuli. Calkin's theory

12995-462: Was distinct from the ancient deductive -thinking approach that had dominated the intellectual world since the times of Greek philosophers like Thales , Anaximander , and Aristotle . Thales ( c.  624 –546 BCE) believed that everything in the universe comes from one main substance, water. He deduced or specified from a general idea, "everything is water," to the specific forms of water such as ice, snow, fog, and rivers. Modern scientists used

13110-590: Was manifest in more purely formal terms, such as color, freedom from objective context, and a reduction of form to basic geometric designs. Computer scientists use abstraction to make models that can be used and re-used without having to re-write all the program code for each new application on every different type of computer. They communicate their solutions with the computer by writing source code in some particular computer language which can be translated into machine code for different types of computers to execute. Abstraction allows program designers to separate

13225-482: Was not thought of as a cognitive process, but now much research is being undertaken to examine the cognitive psychology of emotion; research is also focused on one's awareness of one's own strategies and methods of cognition, which is called metacognition . The concept of cognition has gone through several revisions through the development of disciplines within psychology. Psychologists initially understood cognition governing human action as information processing. This

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