Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- List of contributors
- Preface
- Part I The nature–nurture question: New advances in behavior-genetic research on intelligence
- Part II Novel theoretical perspectives on the genes and culture controversy
- Part III Specific issues in the nature–nurture controversy
- 12 Educating intelligence: Infusing the Triarchic Theory into school instruction
- 13 Raising IQ level by vitamin and mineral supplementation
- 14 The resolution of the nature–nurture controversy by Russian psychology: Culturally biased or culturally specific?
- 15 The emerging horizontal dimension of practical intelligence:Polycontextuality and boundary crossing in complex work activities
- 16 Cognitive development from infancy to middle childhood
- 17 Intelligence, language, nature, and nurture in young twins
- 18 Sources of individual differences in infant social cognition:Cognitive and affective aspects of self and other
- Part IV Integration and conclusions
- Name index
- Subject index
15 - The emerging horizontal dimension of practical intelligence:Polycontextuality and boundary crossing in complex work activities
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 05 June 2012
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- List of contributors
- Preface
- Part I The nature–nurture question: New advances in behavior-genetic research on intelligence
- Part II Novel theoretical perspectives on the genes and culture controversy
- Part III Specific issues in the nature–nurture controversy
- 12 Educating intelligence: Infusing the Triarchic Theory into school instruction
- 13 Raising IQ level by vitamin and mineral supplementation
- 14 The resolution of the nature–nurture controversy by Russian psychology: Culturally biased or culturally specific?
- 15 The emerging horizontal dimension of practical intelligence:Polycontextuality and boundary crossing in complex work activities
- 16 Cognitive development from infancy to middle childhood
- 17 Intelligence, language, nature, and nurture in young twins
- 18 Sources of individual differences in infant social cognition:Cognitive and affective aspects of self and other
- Part IV Integration and conclusions
- Name index
- Subject index
Summary
Introduction
In a landmark article on culture and intelligence, the collective of the Laboratory of Comparative Human Cognition (1982) pointed out that a context-specific account of the cultural basis of intelligence is crucially dependent on the formulation and employment of an adequate unit of analysis.
Concerned as we are with specifying how the outside influences the inside and vice versa, we cannot proceed leaving these two systems as independent entities. Somehow, we must deal with the problem of inside and outside together, as mutually influencing systems [p. 695].
The authors of that paper suggested the concept of activity, and the closely related notion of cultural practice, as the most promising candidates for such a unit. Object-oriented, artifact-mediated activity is the central concept of the cultural-historical approach to higher mental functions, initiated by Vygotsky (1978), Leont'ev (1978), and Luria (1978).
Activity is a molar, not an additive unit of the life of the physical material subject. In a narrower sense, that is, at the psychological level, it is a unit of life, mediated by psychic reflection, the real function of which is that it orients the subject in the objective world. In other words, activity is not a reaction and not a totality of reactions but a system that has structure, its own internal transitions and transformations, its own development
[Leont'ev, 1978, p. 50; also Wertsch, 1981; Smirnov, 1994].- Type
- Chapter
- Information
- Intelligence, Heredity and Environment , pp. 440 - 462Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 1996
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