Intellect

INTELLECT (from Latin intelligere to understand), reason, mind—a concept uniting a group of higher cortical (psychiatric) functions of man, the phylogenetic perfection of which, among other factors, determined for the species Homo sapiens its dominant role on the globe. Considered in a broader sense, intellect is equivalent to cognition, traditionally contrasted with feeling and will, and then the intellect includes sensation, perception, representation, the processes of association, concept formation, and thinking; each of the enumerated acts is dedicated to a corresponding chapter in numerous treatises of subjective psychology (e.g., in Höffding, Wundt, James, Ebbinghaus, etc.). In a narrower sense, intellect is merely the most complex manifestation of human cognitive activity—thinking, characterized as the cognition of connections and relations and the anticipation of the possibility of such changes as are not yet present at a given moment. In this lies the socio-biological significance and high value of the intellect, which represents the most perfect type of adaptation of the human organism to the ceaseless variability of environmental conditions. The doctrine of the intellect in this sense was until recently the most difficult and poorly developed area of subjective psychology. The conviction long prevailed that thinking represents merely a combination of ordinary associative processes, but only of a more complex and "high" order. It was considered obvious that all thinking proceeds through the mediation of auxiliary graphic representations and that "without images" no activity of the intellect, ultimately reducible to sensations, is possible. The so-called Würzburg school (Külpe, Ach, Messer, Bühler, and others), which specially studied thinking in its most abstract forms using the "systematic experimental method of introspection" proposed by it, opposed this proposition. It came to the conclusion that thinking is a qualitatively specific experience not reducible to the laws of association and not necessarily connected with imagery; it is characterized either as the direct apprehension of some "rule" or "relation" or consists of the experience of a peculiar inner activity (intension). The conclusions of the Würzburg school by no means received universal recognition. In general, the problem of the intellect, as indeed many others, proved beyond the powers of subjective psychology. At the present time, this question, connected with the doctrine of speech reactions, is receiving a new objective illumination.

J. Cannable, intellect, or intellectual behavior, in objective behaviorism denotes behavior usually characterized by a planned combination of individual skills directed toward solving known complex problems. In this sense, intellectual behavior differs, for example, from instinctive, reflex, and habitual behavior. The behavior of these latter types can solve complex and novel tasks for the organism only through more or less accidental success resulting from a succession of trial and error; thus, intellectual behavior differs in the special structure of the act of behavior itself. This structure is characterized by the following phases: 1) inhibition of primitive reflex impulses caused by certain elements of the perceived situation or by endogenous stimuli, 2) preliminary planning of that external act which will be directed toward resolving the proposed situation, 3) the actual execution of the given adaptive act. From this it follows that the intellectual act is not a process of direct adaptation of the organism to the task set before it, but is always mediated, passing through a phase of preliminary planning, which plays an exclusively auxiliary, functionally special role here and serves merely as preparation for the final motor action. Thus (if we discard the first moment of inhibition of direct, impulsive reactions), the intellectual process in its structure is characterized by the presence of two quite definitively outlined phases: the preparatory (or planning) phase and the active, motor, or executive phase. The considerably greater complexity of the intellectual process compared to the reflex or instinctive one nevertheless makes it possible to overcome incomparably more complex and novel situations precisely thanks to the preliminary organized planning of adaptation. The internal (introspectionistic) expression of intellectual activity is a series of experiences characterized as thinking. The specific structure of the intellectual process presupposes completely special mechanisms by means of which such planned, organized behavior is carried out. The role of one of such auxiliary mechanisms in human behavior is played first of all by speech. In a child (and sometimes in an adult primitive), this speech bears an uninhibited character; in an adult, it most often becomes internal, inaudible. Experimental isolation of this internal speech process usually greatly hinders the course of outwardly expressed intellectual activity. Conversely, every serious difficulty in external activity usually causes a sharp switch to speech production; this is clearly seen in a child, in whom, upon an external difficulty in an operation, an explosion of speech reactions is immediately observed. These same manifestations usually do not bear a communicative character, that is, they are not directed toward contact with others; they are usually associated with the difficulty that caused them and bear the character of a preliminary planning of future actions; known real manipulations of things are replaced here by preliminary operations in words with the subsequent execution of this in action. Under these conditions, the execution of each segment of the intellectual operation bears (as Kohler indicates) the character of a single closed movement. In the form of an anticipation of the individual elements of the indicated process, and in classical theories of intellect, there are indications of mechanisms objectively characterizing intellectual behavior; however, each of these propositions receives its sufficiently complete significance only in comparison with the entire system of intellectual behavior. Ebbinghaus considers intellect to be the ability to combine, subordinated at the same time to one definite set. Stern considers intellect to be the ability through mental operations to adapt to new external situations. O. Lipmann proceeds in the concept of intellect from an analysis of the structure of the intellectual reaction; he points out that each intellectual act is usually directed toward a definite thing (and then it bears the character of recognition of a known structure) or toward a definite goal (then it bears the character of transformation of this structure). Proceeding from this, he considers it possible to distinguish several separate types of intellect, characterized however by the organized adaptation of the individual to various complex situations. Finally, Ach and his school see in intellect a process that is composed of the following separate elements: 1) the ability to pose and understand known tasks, 2) to carry them out by mobilizing appropriate means, relying on determining tendencies excited in the individual by the corresponding situation. Thus, in Ach as well, the intellectual operation breaks down into the perception (grasping) of a known task or situation and its resolution with the help of a determining tendency, which he understands exclusively as known subjective states. In all these constructions (possessing, it is true, unequal degrees of clarity and objectivity), it is invariably emphasized that the intellectual act does not represent a simple combination of associations (as 19th-century associationists thought) or of habits and reflexes (as contemporary authors standing on a mechanistic point of view have often tried to prove), but has its own special structures of mechanisms, as objective as other mechanisms of behavior, but differing merely in functionally other features. The process of intellectual behavior, completely undisputed when applied to humans, has aroused great disputes as far as animals are concerned. Thorndike, following a whole series of authors, tried to show that animal behavior is devoid of a planned, intellectual character; in his experiments with a cat, he showed that an animal placed in a difficult situation for it solves the problem by a certain coincidence of habitual movements and the consolidation of those of them that were accompanied by success. The successful movement, reinforced by a known stimulus, can, in Thorndike's opinion, form a definite habit, and to an outside observer it will seem that the animal performs the given process by an intellectual solution, although in reality no preliminary planning process is present. In a whole series of interesting studies devoted to the intellect of anthropoid apes, Kohler provided materials refuting Thorndike's point of view and showed with indisputable clarity the presence of peculiar forms of intellectual behavior in anthropoids. Kohler's experiments boiled down to the fact that he placed an ape (chimpanzee) in a situation where the attracting stimulus acting on the animal (fruit) lay at such a distance from it that it was directly impossible to reach it. Observing the apes, Kohler noted that they nevertheless turn out to be in a state to resolve the given task, moreover resolving it not by an accidental combination of habits, but by a known organized action, using rather complex roundabout paths and sometimes even employing known external tools. The ape refused the direct, impulsive solution of the task, inhibited primitive attempts, turned first to the preparation or acquisition of the tool it needed (a stick, a hook, a pile of boxes if the fruit was placed high, etc.) and only then with the help of this tool turned to the solution of the given task. The process of behavior here too bore a clearly expressed "intellectual" character, breaking down into two phases, the first of which was preparatory, and the second executive. In the "intellectual" operation of the animal, until recently, the only unclear mechanism remained by means of which the ape carries out the preliminary, planning stage of its behavior. In the absence of planning speech, this process would have to rely on certain other mechanisms. A number of studies indicated that in the "intellectual" behavior of apes, vision plays a huge and functionally peculiar role and that by the mechanism of solving tasks the ape could be called an "optoid." It was sufficient to place the goal and the tool in the same visual field to make the solution of the task accessible and sufficiently easy for the ape. Placing the goal and the object in different visual fields made the task almost insoluble for the ape. This specific role of the visual field in intellectual operations was studied with particular care by E. Jaensch in his experiments on so-called eidetics. In individuals possessing very vivid and stable visual after-images, Jaensch observed a peculiar form of solving "intellectual" tasks by influencing optical eidetic images in a known manner. If a stick and an apple were presented to the subject on a screen, from the fixation of which corresponding vivid eidetic images remained, then after a suggestion to strongly desire to obtain the apple, the subject began to feel the convergence of the eidetic images of the indicated objects, and it seemed to him that the hook of the stick grasped the apple. A whole series of data leads us to suppose that such a preliminary optoid solution of the task by the convergence of the optical traces of perceived images reflects the presence of that special mechanism which replaces preliminary, planning speech where it is absent.

It is clear that the presence of this primitive mechanism makes "intellectual" adaptation at these stages very imperfect, limits it to the bounds of visual actions, and only with difficulty allows it to go beyond the limits of a single optical field. What has been said above makes it possible to distinguish at least three stages in the development of the intellect, each predominating at different genetic levels. 1. The stage of pre-intellectual processes, in which each stimulus evokes an immediate motor impulse; behavior is not yet articulated into preparatory and executive phases, and adaptation occurs by means of directly emerging manipulation of external objects on the basis of respective trials and errors. Such behavior is also characteristic of certain types of mental retardation. 2. The stage of optoid intellect, which is characterized by the preliminary solution of tasks in the visual field and their successive execution in action. 3. The stage of speech intellect, which is characterized by the preliminary planning of action with the help of speech, even if internal, and the subsequent organized execution of what has been planned. It is quite natural that at each of the described stages the activity of the intellect differs in specific features, and therefore the attempt to regard the intellect as an always unchanging formation is highly metaphysical. In connection with the genetic stages, but not exhausted by them, stands the question of the types of intellect. The concept of a single, general intellect has been greatly shaken during the recent period in the development of science and has been replaced by a whole series of separate, more particular, but thereby also more concrete concepts. Thus, modern psychology distinguishes at least two main types of intellect: practical, associated with a certain external activity, and gnostic, or speech intellect, associated with operations using certain logical categories and carried out with the help of speech mechanisms. The development of both these types of intellect may often not coincide in the same person; in a whole series of cases they reveal a rather sharp divergence from one another. Thus, Stern, Lindeman, and others who investigated the activity of profoundly retarded children, established almost always a significant decrease in the gnostic intellect alongside a practical intellect that was preserved in a number of cases. It is quite understandable that such processes differing in their structure, like practical and gnostic intellect, are subject to study by completely different methods. For the study of the first, there are the schemes of Lipmann, Stern, special practical tests, such as the "Bogen maze", and the like; for the investigation of the second, tests of a verbal character are used. Especially great attention of researchers was occupied by the question of measuring the intellect. The considerable complexity and diversity of the process made this question very difficult to resolve, and one can say that there is no unified established methodology for measuring the intellect even to this day. Thorndike considers it possible to express the development of the intellect in three main dimensions: 1) height, or power of the intellect, determined by the solution of a known number of tasks of increasing difficulty; 2) "area" of the intellect, expressed in the quantity of various types of tasks of equal difficulty that turn out to be accessible for solution, and 3) speed of the intellect, measured by the time spent on solving given tasks. It is quite clear that for such measurements it is necessary to use a number of special tests covering individual concrete intellectual functions. Thorndike singles out for this purpose the so-called CAVD series (tests for text completion, arithmetic operations, vocabulary richness, and the ability to control one's actions according to a specific instruction), other authors give other combinations of tests. All tests aimed at investigating intellectual development can be divided into two large groups: some of them single out a number of functions that are as simple as possible and at the same time important for the intellect (attention, memory, combinatorial functions, etc.) and analytically investigate each such function with separate tests (this is how, for example, Rossolimo's system of tests is compiled); others study not a single function, but a whole complex group of intellectual processes (Binet's test system, for example, is built on this). All these systems can have not only a measuring but also a diagnostic significance, revealing individual defects in the intellectual activity of the subject that remain insufficiently noticeable without such research. Especially serious significance for the investigation of the intellect is possessed by a number of laboratory-psychological methods, the application of which makes it possible to study the very mechanisms of intellectual operations. As early as the beginning of the 20th century, the Würzburg school tried to trace the mechanisms of intellectual activity by the method of systematic experimental introspection. However, the data showed that it is not possible to study these mechanisms in a purely subjective way and that the characteristic mechanisms of intellectual activity often escape detection in the process. A number of authors (Aschaffenburg, Ziehen, Jung, and others) tried to uncover a number of intellectual mechanisms by tracing the associative activity of the personality; of particular interest were attempts to trace speech and intellectual mechanisms genetically and comparatively-pathologically (Ziehen, Jung, Ivanov-Smolensky, Luria). Substantial data to the study of the intellect were contributed by Ach's school, which developed a methodology for studying one of the most important intellectual processes—concept formation—and traced this process in normal adults, children, and patients. The study of the intellect receives substantial assistance from pathology. Of especially great significance for clarifying the mechanics of the intellect are cases with such diseases as aphasia, agnosia, and the like, in which it is possible to uncover many mechanisms of intellectual processes and to isolate within them those moments that are attributed to the activity of speech, the function of perception, etc. Nature as if performs the work of the experimenter here. On the other hand, the theory of intellectual processes developed by psychologists provides significant assistance to the clinic, replacing the summary notion of "dementia", feeblemindedness, with a completely definite notion of the violation of certain concrete mechanisms of the intellect.

A. Luria.