Fluid Intelligence and Crystallized Intelligence: what are they?

What is Fluid Intelligence? What is Crystallized Intelligence? We review both concepts.

According to the dictionary of the Royal Academy of the Spanish Language, “intelligence"comes from the Latin term intelligentia. Some of the meanings we are interested in rescuing are the following:

• Ability to understand or comprehend

• Ability to solve problems

• Knowledge, comprehension

• Ability, skill and experience

What is intelligence?

Each of these meanings refers to a differentiated area in which, routinely, intelligence plays a fundamental role. From a rational point of view, understanding and understanding and comprehension are essential factors in problem solving.. The way in which human beings analyze the options we have to find the best procedure towards an unknown outcome involves a high level of cognitive development. Skill and dexterity are also a product of one's intelligence.

The experienceFinally, experience has a bidirectional relationship with intelligence: they develop in parallel, and feed back on each other. However, what is certain is that there must be a categorization that better understands the different kinds of intelligence that exist, in order to better understand the concept and how it helps us to solve tasks of such a disparate nature.

Capabilities related to intelligence

Traditionally, intelligence has been closely linked to these capabilities:

• Thinking and making associations between concepts

• Solving everyday problems

• Generating new (more complex) problems

• Creating innovations and solving problems in the cultural sphere.

Primary skills of intelligence according to Thurstone

During the second third of the twentieth century, the University of Chicago psychologist Louis Leon Thurstone (1887 - 1955) developed his studies on the primary abilities of intelligence primary abilities of intelligence, which resulted in the following:

• Language comprehension

• Perceptual agility

• Logical reasoning

• Numerical and mathematical ability

• Verbal fluency

• Spatial perception

Raymond Cattell

More than three decades later, British psychologist Raymond Cattell Raymond Cattell (1905 - 1998) established a novel distinction between two types of intelligences: fluid and crystallized intelligence..

Fluid intelligenceaccording to Cattell, refers to an inherited inherited ability to think and reason in an abstract way, while crystallized intelligence, according to Cattell, refers to an inherited ability to think and reason in an abstract way.while crystallized intelligence is born of experience and embodies the level of acculturation, education and learning.

Intelligence skills according to Robert Sternberg

It was not until 1985 that the Yale University psychologist Robert J. Sternberg Robert J. Sternberg (born 1949) categorized the different abilities that emanate from intelligence into three groups:

• Compositional intelligencerepresents the ability to acquire and store information.

• Experiential intelligencel: this is the ability based on experience that we use to choose, encode, combine and compare information in order to configure new concepts and impressions.

• Contextual intelligencerefers to the adaptive behavior of the person in the natural and social environment that surrounds him/her.

Fluid intelligence and crystallized intelligence

The difference between these two types of intelligence is often linked to the variable age. However, it is more accurate to conceive the difference between fluid and crystallized intelligence based on the influence of heredity and/or environment.

→ Fluid Intelligence

The fluid intelligence refers to the person's ability to adapt and to adapt and face new situations in an agile way, without previous learningwithout previous learning, experience or acquired knowledge being a determining factor in its manifestation.

Fluid intelligence is closely linked to the neurophysiological variables neurophysiological variables (for example, with the development of neuronal connections), and its influence is more pronounced since its development depends largely on the genetic basis. The same is not true of crystallized intelligence.

In the same sense, we can establish a link between the potential development of fluid intelligence and the child's growth in an enriching environment. Living in a positive and nurturing environment correlates with the development of neural connections in brain regions associated with memory, learning and spatial orientation. correlates with the development of neural connections in brain regions associated with memory, learning and orientation in space.

Components of fluid intelligence

Fluid intelligence is composed of:

• The ability to reason with abstract content.

• Logical reasoning

• The ability to establish relationships or extract differences

Fluid intelligence peaks early in its development, around adolescence.. This is a major difference with respect to the peak of crystallized intelligence. Thus, during adulthood, this capacity tends to be progressively reduced as the body ages and neural structures deteriorate.

The decline of fluid intelligence may be due to several factors: normative aging, accidents, pathologies, drug use, etc. The latter three factors may cause lesions or alterations in various structures of the brain and the central nervous system. These last three factors can cause lesions or alterations in the various structures of the brain and in the central nervous system.

→ Crystallized Intelligence

Crystallized intelligence is the set of abilities, strategies and knowledge that constitute the degree of cognitive development achieved in the brain. the degree of cognitive development achieved through a person's learning history..

Components of crystallized intelligence

Crystallized intelligence encompasses skills linked to:

• Language comprehension

• The degree of understanding and use of semantic relations.

• The valuation of experience

• The capacity to establish judgments and conclusions

• Mechanical knowledge

• Orientation in space

Crystallized intelligence depends to a high degree on the learning obtained from the experience of the person in the cultural context in which he/she lives and relates. in which he lives and relates. The development of the crystallized intelligence of each person depends to a great extent on the good investment of his or her historical fluid intelligence in habits that allow him or her to learn new things. In other words, the potential for intellectual development with which we are born (also called historical fluid intelligence) will achieve a greater or lesser level depending on the educational experiences that occur during life.

In fact, the development of intellectual capacities can progress during life to the extent that the experiential context and the person's motivation to continue learning allow it.

The way in which life experience intervenes in a person's intelligence can be known through the observation of the effects of stress on the individual's intelligence.eterioration of brain structures. According to a recent study by the University of Toronto, the hormones that the human body secretes when we are worried or nervous directly affect a brain area linked to cognitive functions, such as memory or orientation in space.

Thus, as we pointed out in the article "5 tricks to increase your intelligence", it is essential both the constant search for new knowledge and to lead a balanced life if we aim to keep our cognitive abilities at their best.

Bibliographical references:

• Rice, Philips F. et al. (1997). "Human Development". Pearson.

• Shaffer, D. (2005). "Developmental psychology: childhood and adolescence". Edition, 5th ed. Publication, Mexico City.

• Triglia, Adrian; Regader, Bertrand; and Garcia-Allen, Jonathan (2018). "What is intelligence?". EMSE Publishing.