Drawing Ability, Genes, and Intelligence

Notes by Howard Gardner

A study by Rosalind Arden et al in Psychological Science measures whether drawing ability has a correlation with genes and overall intellectual capacity by testing over 7,000 pairs of twins. The study presents two findings:

1) how well students draw has a genetic component; and
2) drawing ability relates to general intelligence.

Actually, however, the report is quite misleading. The test is not a test of drawing in any artistic sense; indeed, the authors state that their "scoring system ignores features such as overall size, charm, proportion, expressed emotions… and other characteristics of children’s drawings.” Indeed, far from presenting a new measure of anything, the study is simply a repetition of work that is almost a century old, as described in Florence Goodenough’s book Measurement of Intelligence by Drawing (1926). The scorers only take into account how many features of the body are included, period.

As for drawing ability having a genetic component, it is worth noting but hardly surprising, as so does virtually every human behavior except for traits such as language. From the view of either classical intelligence theory or the theory of multiple intelligences, we have not learned anything new.

Reference:

Arden, R., M. Trzaskowski, et al. "Genes Influence Young Children’s Human Figure Drawings and Their Association With Intelligence a Decade Later." (2014). Psychological Science 25(10), pp. 1843-1950.

Rationality vs. Intelligence

Notes by Howard Gardner

The work of Keith Stanovich over the past years has focused on an aspect of cognition that is extremely important: whether individuals can think rationally/systematically/shrewdly about a complex topic, weigh relevant factors, and avoid "group think," biases, and egocentrism to come to plausible solutions and then test the likelihood of those solutions. As he points out, this form of thinking was investigated initially by Nobel Prize winner Daniel Kahneman and his associate, the late Amos Tversky. For examples of Stanovich's recent writings, see his piece in Project Syndicate, his article in British Journal The Psychologist, and his article in Scientific American Mind.

Stanovich has assembled considerable evidence that the capacity to think rationally is significantly different from the logical and mathematical capacities that are probed in IQ tests. (Typically, these take the form of short answer and right/wrong kinds of clever puzzles.) And since presumably we value rationality, it is important to understand that capacity better and to have ways of assessing it and also promoting it.

Stanovich does not invoke multiple intelligences theory; there is no reason to think that he believes that MI ideas are relevant to the assessment of nurturance of rationality. But in the article from The Psychologist, I was struck by the following passage: “Unlike the case of fluid intelligence, fluid rationality is likely to be multifarious—composed of a variety of different cognitive styles and dispositions. As a multifarious concept, fluid rationality cannot be assessed with a single type of item.”

My own hypothesis is that intelligences might contribute to rationality in two distinct ways. First of all, individuals with high amounts of intrapersonal intelligence (understanding themselves, including their predilections and prejudices) and interpersonal intelligence (understanding others, taking into account their perspective, not assuming that one’s gut feeling is necessarily on target) might be more aware of traps and therefore less likely to succumb to them. Second, individuals may display more rationality with respect to areas where they have a great deal of expertise. And so, for example, architects might be less likely to act irrationally when it comes to environmental matters (spatial intelligence), while athletes are more likely to behave rationally in sports (bodily-kinesthetic intelligence).

Is There a Specific ‘Face Detection’ Mechanism, and Does It Matter?

Notes by Howard Gardner

A 2012 study in Cognitive Neuropsychology which examines deficits in facial recognition ability was recently brought to my attention. The article provides persuasive evidence that human beings have evolved a specific neural mechanism for the recognition of faces. On the one hand, I did not need to be persuaded, because I (and other members of my family) have prosopagnosia (literally, the inability to know faces). But it is always good to have research evidence to back up the claim of a cognitive disability and also to begin to determine the limits of that disability.

When in our early twenties, both my daughter Kerith and I discovered that we had a deficit that most others did not lack. We would go to some kind of conference, meet people in the evening, and appear to insult them when we did not recognize them the next day. And that is because, as prospagnosics, we cannot pick out face-specific features; instead, we rely on props like color and style of hair, presence and type of moustache, style of dress, gait of walking, etc. As with other deficits, we could not completely compensate; all we could do is develop strategies, ranging from writing detailed notes for ourselves about the appearance of people to telling new acquaintances that we would not recognize them on a subsequent encounter.

In earlier times, prosopagnosia did not, in effect, exist. And that is because, as a species, we have evolved to know 100-150 persons, no more, and those persons can be identified in numerous ways. (That is why Kerith and I were unaware of our deficits when we were younger.) Only in a modern ‘weak tie’ society, where one meets hundreds of individuals superficially, does prosopagnosia become a significant deficit.

Is there such a thing as facial intelligence? I answer this question negatively. Inability to recognize faces, at least until this point in time, is a specific kind of visual disorder, akin to color blindness or monocular vision, both of which I also have (my daughter is more fortunate). It is also akin to a sense of absolute pitch—something that is easily acquired by some (I was one) and with great difficulty for others. I would call these modality-specific disorders.

In contrast, an intelligence refers to the way that information is processed, once it has been picked up by one or more sensory organs. Linguistic intelligence is mobilized whether we encounter language through the ears, through the eyes, or (if we are blind) through a sense of touch. We can speak of interpersonal intelligence, because we infer how other persons are feeling, using input from several sensory modalities. And, interestingly, I know of no evidence that prosopagnosics are worse (or better) than others in reading mood off of faces.

Read the article in its entirety in Cognitive Neuropsychology.

Reference:
Wilmer, J.B. et al. "Capturing specific abilities as a window into human individuality: The example of face recognition." (2012). Cognitive Neuropsychology, 29 (5 –6), pp. 360 –392.

Adolescent and Adult Intellectual Development

Notes by Howard Gardner

A study published in Current Directions in Psychological Science proposes a framework of adult intelligence that supplements more traditional views of intelligence to include domain knowledge, thereby taking into account information that is learned in occupations and avocational activities past adolescence.

Most studies of intelligence are carried out with young people. Recently, there has been growing interest in how intelligence develops, or fails to develop, over the course of a lifetime. This study documents the importance of what the author calls “the current depth and breadth of domain knowledge.” The author correctly notes that much of what goes on in the adult years concerns a person’s ability to sustain or even enhance his performance in specific areas—e.g. law, engineering, teaching, or the arts. While the study focuses on the domain of performance, rather than on the particular intellectual capacities under scrutiny, it seems evident that individuals do not randomly choose these domains. Rather, a person is attracted to, say, the practice of law, or teaching, or engineering, or the arts, because of his or her special combination of intelligences. The better the fit between an individual’s spectrum of intelligences and the domain of knowledge, the more likely that intellectual growth will continue through the adult years.

Reference:
Ackerman, Philip. "Adolescent and Adult Intellectual Development." (2014). Current Directions in Psychological Science, 23 (4), pp. 246-251.

Practice Does Not Make Perfect

Notes by Howard Gardner

A study published in the journal Psychological Science claims to show that music practice does not have an effect on music ability after researchers observed 10,500 Swedish twins and found no evidence that practice produced better music skills, suggesting that "genetic variation among individuals affects both ability and inclination to practice."

I am often asked how much of each intelligence in MI theory is based on nature (genetics) and how much on nurture/culture (child-rearing, formal education, practice, etc.). I have been deliberately agnostic on this question because it can only be answered convincingly by the use of behavioral genetics methods, of the sort used by behavioral genetics (as exemplified in the aforementioned article).

That said, both my wife Ellen Winner (author of the well-known book Gifted Children: Myths and Realities) and I have been extremely skeptical of the claims, made chiefly in the scholarly literature by K. Anders Ericsson and colleagues and in the popular press by Malcolm Gladwell) that talent is essentially due to practice. No one doubts that practice is necessary, but we (and others) have doubted that anyone can become an expert, and that there is no such thing as talent. As I’ve put it most dramatically, if you were in the same cello class as Yo-Yo Ma, you’d soon see the difference in performance from one week to the next. The same goes for other domains—as, for example, being in the same math class as a young person who goes on to win the Putnam competition.

This article is one of the first to actually tease out the effects of heritability on musical ability. Contrary to the Ericsson-Gladwell hypothesis, the association between music practice and music ability turns out to be largely genetic; moreover, differences in the environments of subjects did not contribute materially to differences in the capacity to discriminate rhythms, melodies, and pitches.

In a similar study, also in Psychological Science, researchers studied the effects of deliberate practice on performance in several domains, including music, games, sports, education, and professions, finding that practice was a poor measure of explaining variance in performance in each case (from explaining 26% of the variance for games, down to less than 1% for professions).

While a single study or pair of studies should not be over-interpreted, such findings should give pause to those who believe that practice alone determines how well one will perform and at what rate expertise will be achieved.

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