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Keith Stanovich has written an interesting book titled What Intelligence Tests Miss . The book is about the fact that IQ tests are incomplete measures of cognitive functioning. There is, as studies have show, in fact only a low to medium correlation between rational thinking skills and IQ test performance. And because rational thinking skills and IQ are largely independent it is not surprising that intelligent people can easily behave irrationally and hold false and unsupported beliefs. Several things are really interesting about this book. One is the authors insight that we do not need to stretch to non-cognitive domains (to notions as emotional intelligence or social intelligence) to see the lacunae in IQ tests. Another is the very specific and research based analysis of the topic matter. The tripartite framework of cognitive functioning The author presents an elegant and rather comprehensive model of cognitive functioning in which three types of major thinking processes and thei...

© 2004, Coert Visser We often routinely talk about intelligence and we attempt to measure it for a variety of purposes. But how well do we know what it is? Jeff Hawkins is one of the first people to present a specific and comprehensive theory of intelligence with a leading role for the human neocortex. Hawkins starts by stating that Human intelligence is fundamentally different from what a computer does. But isn’t artificial intelligence (AI) a good metaphor for human intelligence? No, says Hawkins. In AI a computer is taught to solve problems belonging to a specific domain based on a large set of data and rules. In comparison to human intelligence, AI systems are very limited. They are only good for the one thing they were designed for. Teaching an AI based system to perform a task like catching a ball is hard because it would require vast amounts of data and complicated algorithms to capture the complex features of the environment. A human would have little difficulty with solving su...