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Environmental factors play a role in determining IQ. Proper childhood nutrition is critical for cognitive development as malnutrition can lower IQ. Other research indicates environmental factors such as prenatal exposure to toxins, amount of breastfeeding, and micro nutrient deficiency can affect IQ. It is well known that it is possible to increase one's IQ score by training E.g. Playing puzzle or strategy games, like chess. Musical training in childhood also increases IQ. Recent studies have shown that training in using one's working memory may increase IQ.
Piaget believed that the child plays an active role in the growth of intelligence and learns by doing. He regarded the child as a philosopher who perceives the world only as they have experienced it. Because of this most of Piaget’s inspiration in cognitive and intellectual development came from observations of children. With each stage, Piaget created experiments that would help him to understand that stage better E.g. the Concrete operational stage had the 'conservation of number' test.
Conservation of number test
The nature versus nurture debate is about the relative importance of an individual's innate qualities versus personal experiences in determining individual differences in physical and behavioral traits.
http://www.diffen.com/difference/Nature_vs_Nurture
Strengths and Weaknesses
Strengths
Piaget had a huge influence on psychology. He changed how people viewed the child’s world and their methods of studying children. He was an inspiration to many who came after and took up his ideas. Piaget's ideas have generated a huge amount of research which has increased our understanding of cognitive development. His ideas have been of practical use in understanding and communicating with children, particularly in the field of education.
Weaknesses
Because Piaget concentrated on the universal stages of cognitive development and biological maturation, he didn't consider the effect that the social setting and culture may have on cognitive development. Piaget’s methods (observation and clinical interviews) are more open to biased interpretation than other methods. Because Piaget conducted the observations alone data collect are based on his own subjective interpretation of events. It would have been more reliable if Piaget did the observations with another researcher then compared results afterwards to check if they are similar.
Piaget carried out his studies with a handful of participants, and in the early studies he generally used his own children. This sample is biased, and accordingly the results of these studies cannot be generalized to children from different cultures.
In Harlow's initial experiments, infant monkeys were separated from their mothers at six to twelve hours after birth and were raised instead with substitute or "surrogate" mothers made either of heavy wire mesh or of wood covered with cloth. Both mothers were the same size, but the wire mother had no soft surfaces while the other mother was cuddly covered with foam rubber and soft terry cloth. Both mothers were also warmed by an electric light placed inside them.
In one experiment both types of surrogates were present in the cage, but only one was equipped with a nipple from which the infant could nurse. Some infants received nourishment from the wire mother, and others were fed from the cloth mother.
Results
Strengths and weaknesses
Monkey babies that had grown up in an unstable environment (either with only a mother or no mother and no playmates) showed signs of fear or aggressiveness. Contact comfort derived from an infant's physical contact with the mother or caregiver. Even though the wire mothers had the food, the baby monkeys still preferred the soft cloth mother because of the comfort it provided them.
Even when the wire mother was the source of nourishment (and a source of warmth provided by the electric light), the infant monkey spent a greater amount of time clinging to the cloth surrogate. These results led researchers to believe the need for closeness and affection goes deeper than a need for food and nutrition.
Strengths
He used a large amount of subjects for his experiment which makes his results reliable.
Weaknesses
Because the experiment was done on Monkeys we are unable to depend on this experiment for human subjects.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Genetic_Studies_of_Genius
A very general mental capability that, among other things, involves the ability to reason, plan, solve problems, think abstractly, comprehend complex ideas, learn quickly and learn from experience.
http://answers.yahoo.com/question/index?qid=20080919085205AASOOrX
A still-running longitudinal study begun in 1921 to examine the development and characteristics of gifted children into adulthood. The study was started by Lewis Terman at Stanford University and is now the oldest and longest running longitudinal study in the world.
It is not merely book learning, a narrow academic skill, or test-taking smarts. Rather, it reflects a broader and deeper capability for comprehending our surroundings—"catching on," "making sense" of things, or "figuring out" what to do.
Terman's goal was to disprove the belief that gifted children were sickly, socially inept, and not well-rounded. The first volume of the study reported data on the children's family, educational progress, special abilities, interests, play, and personality. He also examined the children's racial and ethnic heritage. Terman was a proponent of eugenics, and believed that intelligence testing could be used as a positive tool to shape society.
Based on data collected in 1921-22, Terman concluded that gifted children suffered no more health problems than normal for their age. He also found that the children were usually social, were well-adjusted, did better in school, and were even taller than average. The Terman study created another path for psychologists to take that expands the societies knowledge of whether intelligence is passed on through generations.
Strengths and weaknesses
Strengths
This test led to a number of studies about children's intellectual development
Weaknesses
The study has been criticized for not having a generalizable sample. Terman also meddled in his subject's lives, giving them letters of recommendation for jobs and college and pulling strings at Stanford to help them get admitted. This makes any life outcomes of the sample tainted and ungeneralizable.
Eugenics is a social philosophy which advocates the improvement of human hereditary traits through various forms of intervention. Eugenics has variously been regarded as deplorable in different periods of history.
Because intelligence appears to be (at least) partly dependent on brain structure and the genes shaping brain development, it has been proposed that genetic engineering could be used to enhance the intelligence. Experiments such as the Tryon experiment on mice have demonstrated superior ability in learning and memory in various behavioral tasks.
Robert Tryon created an experiment that tested the proficiency of successive generations of rats in completing a maze. He initiated the experiment by exposing a genetically diverse group of rats to the maze, labeling those who made the fewest errors “bright”, and those with the most errors “dull”. Tryon then mated the “bright” males with “bright” females, and “dull” males with “dull” females. After their children matured, Tryon repeated the maze test with them, and again separated the “bright” and the “dull”, again breeding “bright” with “bright” and “dull” with “dull”. Tryon continued this process for seven generations, creating two distinct breeds of “bright” and “dull” rats. In order to demonstrate that behavior had little effect on the genetically selectively bred rats, and lessen the chance of error when making his conclusions, Tryon cross-fostered the rats—that is, he had a “dull” mother raise “bright” children, and vice versa.
While Tryon's results showed that the “bright" rats made significantly fewer errors in the maze than the “dull" rats did, the question exists of what other sensory, motor, motivational, and learning processes also influenced the results of the experiment. A common misconception of this experiment and other similar experiments is that the observed change in the performance in the maze directly correlates with general learning ability. This is not the case. Rather, it has become a widely accepted belief among behavior geneticists that the superiority of the bright rats was confined to Tryon’s specific test; thus, it is not possible to claim that there is a difference in learning capacity between the two groups of rats. Genetic variation, such as better peripheral vision, can make some rats “bright” and others “dull”, but does not determine their intelligence. Tryon’s famous rat-maze experiment demonstrated that the difference between rat performances was genetic since their environments were controlled and identical.
Tryons experiment was informative and well done. However, this experiment lacked information on the environments the first rats came from, and how all of the rats were treated when involved in this experiment. Tyron did the experiment with seven generations of rats which helped the reliability of the results of the expermient.
From the studies that we have seen we believe that nurture is the dominant factor that contributes to determining the reasoning for high or low IQ. This is because you can have any kind of genes in the world but it all depends on your up-bringing and the environment you have lived in and the affection you have received from family and friends. Although we think nurture is the dominant factor, we still believe that nature has a role to play in determining how you go about your study to get a higher IQ. This is because the hypocampus part of your brain determines you effectiveness of memory, this means that if that is not working or somethings gone wrong, then your ability to remember things is compromised.
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