jog’’) for a target word (e.g., ‘‘lions’’) was unrelated to the rate at which the
same people could scan their memory of pictures of objects containing a vari-
able number of properties (a house containing a door, window, and roof, a
house containing a door and window) for some target property (e.g., a picture
of a particular door).
Gardner notes that people in all cultures develop and appreciate his six pro-
posed categories of intelligence. In all cultures virtually everyone learns some-
thing about music, movement skills such as those used in sports, spatial skills
such as those used in drawing or navigating, social skills such as those used
in soothing a troubled child, reasoning skills such as those underlying the ex-
change of goods and services, and language skills necessary to communicate.
Although the IQ industry and academia implicitly claim that reasoning and
language skills are of overwhelming importance, in most other cultures, in-
cluding segments of our own culture outside of academia, skills such as musi-
cal and social skill are also prized.
Finally, Gardner notes that the mental operations are quite different in each
category of intelligence. Language, for example, uses rules of grammar for com-
bining symbols that bear an arbitrary relationship to ideas. Music uses rhythm
and pitch to create aesthetically pleasing sounds. Logical reasoning entails com-
paring patterns or sequences and deriving implications, often from symbols
that are quite abstract. Social intelligence involves understanding emotions and
motivation. The dissimilarity among these mental operations suggests qualita-
tive differences among categories of intellectual skill.
Criticisms of Gardner’s Frames Gardner’stheoryisnotwithoutitscritics(see
Sternberg, 1990; Richardson, 1991). One complaint is that it and any multi-
faceted theory of individual differences fail to explain the positive correlations
among subtests of IQ inventories. For example, people who do well at explain-
ing a proverb also tend to do well on spatial, nonverbal tests. A reasonable
response to this complaint is the one already discussed, namely, that conven-
tional IQ tests sample from a limited range of possibilities. There are few, if
any, objective tests of musical, social, or kinesthetic skill, few measures of cre-
ativity, few tests measuring how well people learn new information, and few
tests that confront people with problems like those actually encountered in real
life.
Another complaint about Gardner’s theory is that it seems to divide up the
human intellect in a somewhat arbitrary way. Why, for example, is there no
separate category for mechanical intelligence, which Gardner subsumes under
bodily-kinesthetic? Is it not possible that a person could be a skilled mechanic
but not a skilled dancer or athlete? Even Gardner admits, and others have
found, that within a category like spatial intelligence, people who are good
at one aspect of the skill are not necessarily good at other aspects of the
skill. Kosslyn, Brunn, Cave, and Wallach (1984) found that people who are
good at producing accurate visual images from verbal descriptions are not
necessarilythesamepeoplewhoareabletomakerapidrotationaltrans-
formations of visual images. As another example, brain damage can interfere
with the grammatical aspect of language but leave the semantic aspect more or
less intact.
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