The field of intelligence has had its Jekyll and Hyde sides for me personally, which is why I entered the field in the first place. I became interested in intelligence when, as an elementary-school student, I did poorly on IQ tests. In fact, I did so poorly that in sixth grade I was sent back to a fifth-grade classroom to retake the fifth-grade intelligence test. In a sense, my professional career has been an attempt to understand and come to terms with my own early failures on these tests!
The basic questions that have driven me from my undergraduate years until now have concerned the relationship between language, cognition and consciousness.
"An action is considered intentional if the agent has (a) a desire for an outcome, (b) a belief that the action will lead to the outcome, (c) an intention to perform the action, (d) skill to perform the action, and (e) awareness while performing it."
D. Abrahamson. the Twenty Sixth Annual Meeting of the North American Chapter of the International Group for the Psychology of Mathematics Education, 2, Toronto, Ontario, Preney, (2004)