What is the difference between learning ability and intelligence?
In the same way that there are taller and shorter people, there are people who are more intelligent and people who are less so.
Intelligence is a strange thing. Thinking about tests in school, students who are good at mathematics are also good at social studies or languages, and they tend to get good marks in every subject.
From this fact, some have thought that there may be something that can explain intellectual capacity that is consistent regardless of the type of information being handled. Since about 100 years ago, this has been explained with the concept of general intelligence g.
Similar to intelligence is the concept of learning capacity.
Learning capacity is for measuring according to the standard of how quickly the subject can learn within a set time, but is learning capacity the same as intelligence, then?
The relationship between the information processing process and intelligence and learning capacity
Looking through the history of psychological research, it seems that intelligence and learning capacity have been studied as separate fields, frequently making the distinction between the two of them fuzzy.
The paper I discuss today considers the difference between intelligence and learning capacity from a number of studies.
The results may appear obvious at first blush, but the paper states that intelligence and learning capacity can both be explained by general intelligence g, or in other words, that people with higher general intelligence g have higher intelligence (problem-solving abilities) and higher learning capacity.
In relation to the question of why this could happen, information processing, from addition and subtraction to text summarizing tasks, follows multiple processes as shown in the flowchart below, i.e., information input → encoding → (short-term memory ↔ long-term memory) → response output, and each of these steps take some length of time. It’s not quite the same as clock speed in a computer, but it is suggested that some people have a faster basic information processing speed and can solve the same problem faster than others, or can input and output more in a shorter time, resulting in a higher learning capacity.
Although they are both intelligence, linguistic intelligence and motor intelligence are different, and intelligence relating to music or painting or to sociality are also thought to exist independently of linguistic intelligence and motor intelligence. I wondered whether rather than trying your hardest to learn something you are not good at, it would produce greater results to do a little of it and then use the majority of your time and efforts in learning something you are good at. I also wondered whether the teacher who helps you notice the sole fact of what your strength is might be a true educator, rather than the teacher who teaches you a hundred things.
Reference URL: The relationship between learning and intelligence.
