What is naturalistic intelligence?

Naturalistic (or naturalist) intelligence is the ability to recognise, tell apart and classify living things — plants, animals, other features of the natural world — and, by extension, other objects. Howard Gardner added it as the eighth intelligence in his theory of multiple intelligences in the 1990s, set out in Intelligence Reframed (1999). It is often described as being “nature smart”.

What are examples of naturalistic intelligence?

Identifying birds by their calls, telling edible from poisonous mushrooms, noticing which plants in a garden are struggling, sorting rocks or shells into types, or a farmer reading the condition of a herd. Gardner extended it to man-made things too: someone who can identify car models by the sound of the engine is using the same classifying skill.

Is naturalist intelligence a real thing?

The skills are real — people clearly differ in how well they recognise and classify species, and experts categorise in their field differently from novices. Whether those skills form a separate “intelligence” is doubtful. In a 2006 test of Gardner's theory with 200 adults, the two naturalistic tests had among the highest loadings on general intelligence and shared little beyond it, which the researchers read as evidence that naturalistic intelligence is not a coherent separate domain.

Is there a naturalistic intelligence test?

There is no standard, validated test of naturalistic intelligence. Online quizzes that tell you your “intelligence type” are self-descriptions, and in the 2006 study people's self-ratings of their naturalistic ability did not correlate with either naturalistic test. Researchers who want to measure it use classification and species-identification tasks.

What careers suit naturalistic intelligence?

Lists usually name biologist, botanist, ecologist, veterinarian, park ranger, farmer, gardener or geologist. These are illustrations of jobs that use recognition and classification of living things, not research findings: because there is no validated measure of naturalistic intelligence, no study shows that people in those jobs have more of it.

Which famous people had naturalistic intelligence?

Charles Darwin, Jane Goodall and John James Audubon are the usual examples. They are illustrations of the idea chosen after the fact, not people who were ever assessed for it.

Naturalistic Intelligence: Meaning, Examples, Evidence

Naturalistic intelligence is the ability to recognise, tell apart and classify living things — plants, animals and other features of the natural world — and, by extension, other kinds of objects. It is the eighth intelligence in Howard Gardner’s theory of multiple intelligences, added in the 1990s, and is often called being “nature smart”. There is no standard test for it, and a study that tested it alongside Gardner’s other intelligences found that its tasks mostly measured general reasoning ability.

Where the idea comes from

Gardner’s Frames of Mind (1983) listed seven intelligences. In Intelligence Reframed (1999) he added an eighth, the naturalist, and suggested existential intelligence as a possible ninth. He described a naturalist as someone who recognises and classifies objects: hunters, farmers and gardeners, but also people who are good at recognising patterns more generally. His examples went beyond nature — someone who can recognise cars from the sound of their engines is, on his account, using the same ability.

Gardner admits an intelligence by a set of criteria rather than by a test. One criterion is that brain damage can impair it selectively, and for the naturalist he pointed to patients who can name objects but not living things. The rest of his list, and how naturalistic intelligence fits next to interpersonal and intrapersonal intelligence, is in our guide to types of intelligence.

Signs and examples of naturalistic intelligence

These illustrate the definition; they are not a diagnostic checklist:

Fine distinctions between living things. Telling a blackbird’s song from a thrush’s, or one oak species from another, where most people see “a bird” or “a tree”.
Sorting into meaningful groups. Arranging shells, rocks, insects or plants by features that matter rather than by colour or size alone.
Noticing change in an environment. Seeing that a plant is diseased, that a season is turning, or that an animal is behaving unusually.
Transferring the skill to objects. Recognising car models, sneaker brands or fonts at a glance — Gardner’s own extension of the idea.

Popular descriptions often reduce naturalistic intelligence to loving the outdoors or caring about the environment. Gardner’s definition is about recognising and classifying; an enthusiastic hiker who cannot tell one tree from another is not, on that definition, showing much of it.

What the brain evidence shows

The brain criterion rests on real cases. In 1984 Elizabeth Warrington and Tim Shallice described four patients who had partly recovered from herpes simplex encephalitis. In all four there was a significant gap between their ability to identify inanimate objects and their inability to identify living things and foods. The finding is striking, but it is about the organisation of meaning in the brain — knowledge of categories — rather than proof of a separate talent for nature. Gardner also applies the intelligence to cars and other man-made objects, which sits awkwardly with a brain criterion that separates living from non-living things.

Is naturalistic intelligence really a separate intelligence?

The clearest direct test is a 2006 study by Beth Visser, Michael Ashton and Philip Vernon in the journal Intelligence. They gave 200 adults two tests for each of Gardner’s eight intelligences, plus a test of general mental ability. The two naturalistic tests were classification tasks: making logical groups from a list of objects, and choosing the diagram that best describes how three things relate.

They measured general intelligence. One of the naturalistic tests had the highest loading on the general factor of any test in the study, alongside a mathematical-reasoning test; both loaded at .70 or above. The authors attribute this to its demand for logical reasoning.
They shared little beyond that. Once the general factor was removed, the two naturalistic tests were only weakly related to each other. The authors concluded that naturalistic intelligence is not a coherent domain.
People could not judge it in themselves. Neither naturalistic test correlated with participants’ own ratings of their naturalistic ability.

That fits the long-standing finding that the abilities Gardner separates tend to correlate — the pattern called the g factor. More broadly, Lynn Waterhouse’s 2006 review in Educational Psychologist concluded that multiple intelligences theory lacks adequate empirical support; Gardner and Seana Moran replied that the critique misreads the theory. Few researchers doubt that recognising species is a real skill. The dispute is whether calling it an “intelligence” adds anything to knowledge, expertise and reasoning.

Knowledge of nature depends on experience

If naturalistic ability were a fixed trait, how much people know about living things should not depend much on where they grow up. The research suggests it does. Douglas Medin and Scott Atran’s 2004 review of cross-cultural research on folk biology — how people think about plants and animals — concluded that results from university students in industrialised societies often do not generalise, partly because those groups have especially impoverished experience with nature.

A small, often-cited survey makes the same point with children. Andrew Balmford and colleagues showed 109 British primary-school children aged 4 to 11 flashcards of ten common British wildlife types and ten Pokémon “species”, and found the children knew the invented creatures better than the real ones. The skill of telling similar kinds apart was clearly there; what it was spent on depended on what the children were exposed to.

How to develop it

No study shows that a programme raises “naturalistic intelligence” as a whole. What the research does support is that knowledge of a domain grows with exposure and practice:

Learn one group well. Birds, trees, mushrooms or insects in your own area — a field guide or identification app plus regular observation.
Compare similar kinds side by side. The skill is telling apart things that look alike, so practise on near neighbours.
Keep a record. Noting what you saw, where and when turns impressions into knowledge you can check.

What an IQ test measures here

An IQ test, including ours, measures reasoning with patterns, numbers and words. It does not measure knowledge of plants or animals. But the classification and pattern-finding at the core of naturalistic tasks is close to what reasoning tests ask for — which is exactly why, in the 2006 study, a naturalistic task turned out to be one of the best measures of general reasoning.

Trust and scope notes

This page summarises published research for general information. Where we could open only an abstract or a summary of a study, we report only what it states; the 2006 findings are reported from the full data in the author’s thesis. The brain-injury research is described for background only; nothing on this page assesses any medical condition. The IQ Revealed test is an online reasoning test of 40 original items for adults aged 18 and over; it does not measure naturalistic intelligence and is not a clinical assessment.

IQ Revealed is not affiliated with, endorsed by or connected to Howard Gardner or the other researchers, universities and journals named on this page. Pokémon is a trademark of its respective owners (Nintendo, Creatures Inc. and GAME FREAK inc.); IQ Revealed has no connection with them, and the name is used only to describe the study.

Naturalistic Intelligence: Meaning, Examples and Is It Real?