Thurston

Louis Leon Thurstone

(May 29, 1887 - 1955) , Chicago, United States

 He is Famous about Multi Factor Theory of Intelligence. (1938)

 He was an American psychologist who was instrumental in the development of psychometrics
(scientific discipline concerned with the question of how psychological constructs), the science
that measures mental functions, and who developed statistical techniques for multiple-factor
analysis of performance on psychological tests.
 Thurstone was especially concerned with the measurement of people’s attitudes and
intelligence. His criticisms of existing testing methods appeared in The Reliability and Validity of
Tests (1931). He attacked the concept of an ideal mental age(Binet & Simon), then commonly
used in intelligence testing, advocating instead the use of percentile rankings to compare
performance. He also developed a rating scale for locating individual attitudes and opinions
along a continuum between extremes.
 His principal work, The Vectors of Mind (1935), presented Thurstone’s method of factor analysis
to explain correlations between results in psychological tests. Thurstone rejected the idea that
any one factor had more general application than others and evaluated all factors influencing
performance on a given test at one time, devising new statistical techniques to perform the
factor analysis.

Just to be clear Thurston’s theory does not disregard or dismiss spearman’s two-factor theory (Charles
Spearman). In fact it extends it and provides a deeper analysis into the branch of intelligence.
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Thurston’s theory suggests that intelligence of a person can be divided among seven different areas,
these 7 areas are known as seven primary mental abilities, these abilities are completely different
separate and independent of each other.

1. Verbal Comprehension – Is basically about how much and how easily you can understand and
perceive the relevance of material that you are reading or listening to.
Ex. Vocabulary tests, Reading comprehension

2. Number Abilities – this ability measure your comfort and accuracy with numbers. These are
different branches in numerical ability such as ratios, percentage, addition, subtraction, etc..
your accuracy in all these fields determines your numerical ability.
Ex. Math calculations, solving number puzzles

3. Spatial Visualization – This area determines how competent you are in identifying distances
and analysing spaces. The analysis of distances, spaces, dimensions etc. all of this falls under
special visualization.
Ex. Mental rotation tasks & Jigsaw puzzles

4. Perceptual Speed – This determines how fast you can see process and understand the visuals
shown to you and to what depth you can understand them. They are basically test your speed
with visual information.
Ex. Finding matching symbols, scanning tasks, Word factory

5. Word/Verbal Fluency – Basically test your speed and accuracy in coming up with words and
sentences. This is basically tested in our daily lives, verbal fluency is constantly tested when we
have conversations in our routine life. The more fluent and elaborate you are the better you are
at this ability.
Ex. generating synonyms, fliptop, spoken poetry, reporting

6. Memory – this specific ability is used in all the tasks. It determines how much you remember
from the information you have consumed earlier this part of intelligence is considered to be
highly important since childhood. It is all about how much perceived information you can
memorize and keep it stored in your memory.
Ex. Recalling lists of words, remembering faces, Lesson Recalling

7. Introductive reasoning – It is meant to judge your logic reasoning Is your power to build up
logical connections and perceive information in a logical manner. Inductive reasoning means if
 you can reach a general conclusion through some specific details with the help of your reasoning
skills.
Ex. Analogies & Syllogisms (You eat spicy food, you get a stomach ache, you might use
inductive reasoning to conclude that spicy food causes stomach aches.)

http://www.alleydog.com/glossary/definition.php?term=Primary%20Mental%20Abilitieshttp://
psychology.about.com/od/cognitivepsychology/p/intelligence.htmhttp://faculty.txwes.edu/mskerr/
files/3303_ch7.htm

- One intelligence test that specializes in testing these seven different sections is the Wechsler
Adult Intelligence Scale or WAIS that contains both verbal and performance sub-tests. The
WAIS test is divided up like this:

- Standard IQ test, such as the Wechsler Intelligence Scale or Stanford Binet IQ test, is generally
used to determine an individual's intellectual functioning. The average score is 100. People
scoring below 70 are considered to have mental retardation. Professionals also assess the
person's adaptive behavior.