The intelligence testing of infants involves unusual challenges because an infant cannot communicate directly or even understand that he is being tested. For that reason, intelligence testing has been traditionally limited to adults and school-age children. However, psychologists have developed methods to estimate the intelligence of infants as young as 6 months old.
History
General intelligence is thought of as a unified, stable quantity. People who are smart in one area, such as verbal intelligence, are likely to be smart in other areas as well, and are likely to be smart as both children and adults. As recently as 1973, however, psychologist Michael Lewis asserted that intelligence is neither unified nor stable in infants, and that infant intelligence testing cannot reliably predict intelligence at a later age. More recently, however, psychologists such as Joseph Fagan of Case Western Reserve University and Dorothy Einon of University College London have developed infant intelligence tests that can roughly measure infant intelligence in a meaningful way.
Limitations
Infant intelligence scores are not reduced to a single number, as is done in an intelligence quotient test, because the results are too approximate for such a number to be useful. Infant intelligence scores are also more variable than scores of school-age children and adults. An infant identified as average, for example, is much more likely to be tested as above average five years later than a school child tested at 6 and 11 years old, for example.
The Fagan Test
Fagan has created an infant intelligence test that relies on an infant's memory as the main measure of intelligence. Because an infant is more likely to spend more time looking at a stimulus that he experiences as new, it is possible to know whether an infant recognizes a stimulus he has seen before, and therefore measure his memory. In the Fagan infant intelligence test, the infant is presented with a series of visual images. After a period of time, he is presented with the same images again and the length of his gaze is measured to determine how many of them he remembers.
The Fisher-Price Test
The toy manufacturer Fisher-Price commissioned Einon to develop an infant intelligence test to be given to parents based on their observations of their baby's behavior. Questions include whether the baby can imitate an action or recognize that objects still exist even when they cannot be seen. The child's score is then compared with average scores of infants the same age to arrive at an approximate measure of intelligence.
Social Implications
The purpose of measuring an infant's intelligence is to intervene in the child's education while his intelligence is still developing in order to remedy deficiencies and cultivate talent. Fagan, in particular, aims to identify gifted children living in disadvantaged environments and provide educational resources to prevent the baby's intelligence from being wasted.
