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The Psychopathology of Cognitive Deficit

The Blake Marsh Lecture for 1975, delivered before the Royal College of Psychiatrists, 3 February 1975

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  29 January 2018

Neil O'Connor
Neil O'Connor*
Affiliation:
Drayton House, Gordon Street, WC1H 0AN
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Extract

Binet created the psychology of mental deficiency and incidentally the concept of intelligence which for many years has been a central issue in both psychology and education. He was primarily concerned with learning difficulties in children and it is a wry paradox that his development of the notion of intelligence has proved such a barrier to the study of the learning process. Intelligence for Binet was a summary term which stood in place of all the component elements of learning weakness which he noticed and assessed. His successors such as Spearman (1923), Burt (1937), Vernon (1950) and Jensen (1975) tend to use the term in an explanatory fashion although it is doubtful whether ‘intelligence’ explains ‘mental age’ or ‘mental deficiency’ except as a descriptive cross-reference.

Type
Research Article
Information
The British Journal of Psychiatry , Volume 128 , Issue 1 , January 1976 , pp. 36 - 43
Copyright
Copyright © Royal College of Psychiatrists, 1976 

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