medicalexpress | As a person's IQ increases, so too does his or her ability to filter out distracting background motion. This surprisingly strong relationship may help scientists better understand what makes a brain more efficient, and, as a result, more intelligent.
A brief visual task can predict IQ, according to a new study. This surprisingly simple exercise measures the brain's unconscious ability to filter out visual movement. The study shows that individuals whose brains are better at automatically suppressing background motion perform better on standard measures of intelligence.
The test is the first purely sensory assessment to be strongly correlated with IQ and may provide a non-verbal and culturally unbiased tool for scientists seeking to understand neural processes associated with general intelligence. "Because intelligence is such a broad construct, you can't really track it back to one part of the brain," says Duje Tadin, a senior author on the study and an assistant professor of brain and cognitive sciences at the University of Rochester. "But since this task is so simple and so closely linked to IQ, it may give us clues about what makes a brain more efficient, and, consequently, more intelligent." The unexpected link between IQ and motion filtering was reported online in the Cell Press journal Current Biology on May 23 by a research team lead by Tadin and Michael Melnick, a doctoral candidate in brain and cognitive sciences at the University of Rochester. In the study, individuals watched brief video clips of black and white bars moving across a computer screen. Their sole task was to identify which direction the bars drifted: to the right or to the left. The bars were presented in three sizes, with the smallest version restricted to the central circle where human motion perception is known to be optimal, an area roughly the width of the thumb when the hand is extended. Participants also took a standardized intelligence test.
As a person's IQ increases,
so too does his or her ability to filter out distracting background
motion. This surprisingly strong relationship may help scientists better
understand what makes a brain more efficient, and, as a result, more
intelligent.
Read more at: http://medicalxpress.com/news/2013-05-motion-quotient-iq-ability-filter.html#jCp
Read more at: http://medicalxpress.com/news/2013-05-motion-quotient-iq-ability-filter.html#jCp
3 comments:
This is cool.
I'm sure most commenters here are open to the possibility that "ignoring distractions" is not necessarily a success factor in real-world situations. Sometimes it's a weakness.
Also, if IQ largely measures ability to concentrate, then tutoring to improve IQ test results starts to look like at least a possibility.
I believe you are mistakenly equating the brain hardware's ability to filter noise with an individual's conscious (un)willingness to respond to social cues.
It's not necessarily so obvious what is hardware, what is tunable by training/practice, what is filtering, what is signal, and what is noise.
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