How do our mental and personal experience mediate intellectual efficiency? Intellectual competencies as patterns of individual cognitive performance

Abstract

This paper introduces the concept of intellectual competencies as patterns of individual cognitive performance, which manifest themselves while solving cognitive tasks and finding solutions. With the use of in-depth semi-structured interviews conducted while participants (N = 15) solved cognitive tasks of two types, we revealed and informally described 7 intellectual competencies: 1) transformative efforts; 2) feedback receptiveness; 3) ability to compose conceptual gestalts based on past experiences; 4) simultaneous development of several alternative solutions; 5) insistence of cognitive attempts; 6) broad intellectual scope; 7) active information acquisition. It was shown that 4 of these competencies (feedback receptiveness, ability to compose conceptual gestalts based on past experiences, simultaneous development of several alternative solutions, broad intellectual scope) manifest themselves on the same level when solving different cognitive tasks. Intellectual competencies might be an alternative to existing approaches to intelligence studies as they integrate mental and personal experience, mediate actualization of one’s mental resources, and determine the subject’s intellectual efficiency. Refs 31. Table 1.