Answer to Question 1
According to contextualism, intelligence must be understood in its real-world context. The context of intelligence may be viewed at any level of analysis. It may be focused narrowly, as on the home and family environment, or it may be extended broadly, to entire cultures. For example, even cross-community differences have been correlated with differences in performance on intelligence tests. Such context-related differences include those of rural versus urban communities, low versus high proportions of teenagers to adults within communities, and low versus high socioeconomic status of communities. Contextualists have been intrigued particularly by the effects of cultural context on intelligence.
Contextualists consider intelligence to be inextricably linked to culture. They view intelligence as something that a culture creates to define the nature of adaptive performance in that culture. It further accounts for why some people perform better than others on the tasks that the culture happens to value. Theorists who endorse this model study just how intelligence relates to the external world in which the model is being applied and evaluated. In general, definitions and theories of intelligence will more effectively encompass cultural diversity by broadening in scope.
Answer to Question 2
Some neuropsychological research suggests that performance on intelligence tests may not fully indicate a crucial aspect of intelligence. This is the ability to set goals, to plan how to meet them, and to execute those plans. Specifically, people with lesions on the frontal lobe of the brain frequently perform quite well on standardized IQ tests. These tests require responses to questions within a highly structured situation. But they do not require much in the way of goal setting or planning. These tests frequently
use what could be classified as crystallized intelligence. Damage to the posterior regions of the brain seems to have negative effects on measures of crystallized intelligence. In patients with frontal lobe damage, impairments in fluid intelligence is observed. This result should come as no surprise, given that the frontal lobes are involved in reasoning, decision making, and problem solving. Other research highlights the importance of the parietal regions for performance on general and fluid intelligence tasks. Intelligence involves the ability to learn from experience and to adapt to the surrounding environment. Thus, the ability to set goals and to design and implement plans cannot be ignored. An essential aspect of goal setting and planning is the ability to attend appropriately to relevant stimuli. Another related ability is that of ignoring or discounting irrelevant stimuli.
The discovered importance of the frontal and parietal regions in intelligence tasks has led to the development of an integrated theory of intelligence that highlights the importance of these areas. This theory, called the parietal-frontal integration theory (P-FIT), stresses the importance of interconnected brain regions in determining differences in intelligence. The regions this theory focuses on are the Brodmann areas, the prefrontal cortex, the inferior and superior parietal lobule, the anterior cingulate, and portions of the temporal and occipital lobes. P-FIT describes patterns of brain activity in people with different levels of intelligence; it cannot, however, explain what makes a person intelligent or what intelligence is.
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