that have been given by psychologists. Many of these definitions are well known. Although the definitions differ, there are reoccurring features; in some cases these are explicitly stated, while in others they are more implicit. We start by considering ten definitions that take, in our view, a similar perspective:
"It seems to us that in intelligence there is a fundamental faculty, the alteration or the lack of which, is of the utmost importance for practical life. This faculty is judgement, otherwise called good sense, practical sense, initiative, the faculty of adapting oneself to circumstances." A. Binet [BS05]
"The capacity to learn or to profit by experience." W. F. Dearborn quoted in [Ste00]
"Ability to adapt oneself adequately to relatively new situations in life." R. Pinter quoted in [Ste00]
"A person possesses intelligence insofar as he has learned, or can learn, to adjust himself to his environment." S. S. Colvin quoted in [Ste00]
"We shall use the term 'intelligence' to mean the ability of an organism to solve new problems . . . " W. V. Bingham [Bin37]
"A global concept that involves an individual's ability to act purposefully, think rationally, and deal effectively with the environment." D. Wechsler [Wec58] "Individuals differ from one another in their ability to understand complex ideas, to adapt effectively to the environment, to learn from experience, to engage in various forms of reasoning, to overcome obstacles by taking thought." American Psychological Association [NBB+96]
". . . I prefer to refer to it as 'successful intelligence.' And the reason is that the emphasis is on the use of your intelligence to achieve success in your life. So I define it as your skill in achieving whatever it is you want to attain in your life within your sociocultural context - meaning that people have different goals for themselves, and for some it's to get very good grades in school and to do well on tests, and for others it might be to become a very good basketball player or actress or musician." R. J. Sternberg [Ste03] "Intelligence is part of the internal environment that shows through at the interface between person and external environment as a function of cognitive task demands." R. E. Snow quoted in [Sla01]
". . . certain set of cognitive capacities that enable an individual to adapt and thrive in any given environment they find themselves in, and those cognitive capacities include things like memory and retrieval, and problem solving and so forth. There's a cluster of cognitive abilities that lead to successful adaptation to a wide range of environments." D. K. Simonton [Sim03]
Perhaps the most elementary common feature of these definitions is that intelligence is seen as a property of an individual who is interacting with an external environment, problem or situation. Indeed, at least this much is common to practically all proposed definitions of intelligence.