Joy Paul Guilford was a US psychologist, best remembered for his psychometric study of human intelligence, including the important distinction between convergent and divergent production. His "Structure of Intellect" model organized these various abilities along three dimensions: content, product, and process. He sought to develop tests for each combination of the possibilities on these three dimensions, expecting that a person could be high on some of these abilities while being low on others. According to him, Intelligence depends on:
- Mental operations (process of thinking)
- Content (what we think about)
- Product (result of our thinking)
By Content he meant that different people seemed to pay more attention to and think more effectively about different kinds of information. There are 5 kinds of Contents
- Visual - Information perceived through seeing
- Auditory - Information perceived through hearing.
- Symbolic content - arbitrary signs such as numbers or codes
- Semantic content - word meanings
- Behavioral content - nonverbal information involved in human interaction such as emotion
The Products dimension relates to the kinds of information we process from the content types. There are 6 kinds of Products
- Units refer to the ability to perceive units in a content area. This might be symbolic units such as words, visual units such as shapes, or behavioral units such as facial expressions.
- Classes refers to the ability to organize units into meaningful groups and to sort units into the right groups.
- Relations pertains to the ability to sense the relationships between pairs of units.
- Systems consist of the relationships among more than two units.
- Transformations is the ability to understand changes in information, such as rotation of visual figures, or jokes and puns in the semantic area.
- Implications refers to expectation. Given a certain set of information, one might expect certain other information to be true.
The Operations dimension describes what the brain does with and to these types of information. There are 5 kinds of Operations
- Cognition = knowing, discovering, being aware
- Memory = retrieving information
- Divergent thinking = generating multiple responses or decisions
- Convergent thinking = reducing information to one single accepted solution
- Evaluation = judging the appropriateness of information
These three factors combine to identify 150 different skills. i.e 5 x 6 x 5 =150 distinct mental abilities Guilford’s Structure of Intellect can be diagrammatically shown as:
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