The components or processes of the development of intelligence are ambiguous in the psychometric approach. The scores of intelligence tests cannot answer questions such as: What particular ability can be regarded as a component of intelligence? Or, how do individuals come to the solution of the problem? The psychometric approach may provide an objective measure to predict future academic achievements, and can easily make a comparison of ability within the same age group; nevertheless, it failed to give a fuller account of human intellectual ability as intended. Subsequently, more studies have shown a rising interest in the process that leads to the outcome, and thus, turn to the cognitive perspective for an explanation.
In analogical reasoning, there are components such as encoding, inference, mapping, applying, evaluation/justification, and response. Sternberg suggested that like studies of novice versus expert’s performances, more time spend in encoding would lead to better performance since the individual would be more ready for the following components like inference and application. However, despite the identification of such components, his theorizing about the relationships between these components was not supported by most of the research and it was criticized as excessively mechanistic for reducing intelligence to different sequential components.
Spearman argued on theoretical grounds that intelligence involved three distinct components at two levels. At the lower level, there was the apprehension of experience, which involved recognizing the quantitative and qualitative attributes of objects and ideas. The higher-level processes involved the education of relations and correlate — the aspects of logical analysis that came to dominate intelligence testing. Apprehension is, however, commonly used to mean a grasp or an understanding and in that sense, the apprehension of experience — or rather the experience of apprehension — involves a much higher-level ability than Spearman imagined, one that is crucially important in developing conceptual understanding.