street intelligence

the skills people apply in their everyday lives. The term evolved from research conducted in the 1990s by psychologists Terezhina Nunes, David Carraher, and others, who found that street children in Brazil did very poorly in paper-and-pencil tests of the skills that they showed themselves well able to use in street contexts. The street intelligence of these children can be viewed as situated intelligence (see situated cognition) that failed to transfer to a specific testing environment.

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Psychology term of the day

January 13th 2025

discontinuity hypothesis

in Gestalt psychology, the viewpoint that emphasizes the role of sudden insight and perceptual reorganization in successful discrimination learning and problem solving. According to this view, a correct answer is only recognized when its relation to the issue as a whole is discovered. Also called discontinuity theory. Compare continuity hypothesis. See also aha experience; all-or-none learning; eureka task.