This establishes that the tool itself is capable of high level
training. From that starting point, we have observed a vast
distribution of mental development and results. We really do a poor
job on the rest of it. It is enough to say that I have met many who
could have developed a high level of functional intelligence because
of their intrinsic intelligence.
IQ tests actually measure functional intelligence rather well enough.
This test looks to show up intrinsic intelligence. This means that
it will become possible to measure one against the other and use that
information to drive educational objectives. This will have a much
better outcome than we presently experience.
At least now we can separate intrinsic from functional and work with
it. It has to be something like fast and slow twitch in muscles.
Simple Vision Test
Predicts IQ
By Tia Ghose
A simple visual test
is surprisingly accurate at predicting IQ, according to new research.
The study, published
today (May 23) in the journal Current Biology, found that people's
ability to efficiently filter out visual information in the
background and focus on the foreground is strongly linked to IQ. The
findings could help scientists identify the brain processes
responsible for intelligence.
That doesn't mean
snappy, efficient visual processing leads to smarts, said study
co-author Duje Tadin, a neuroscientist at the University of Rochester
in New York. Instead, common brain processes may underlie both
intelligence and efficient visual processing.
IQ hunting
Since the 1800s, the
forefathers of IQ testing, including Sir Francis Galton (who also
pioneered the science of fingerprinting), suspected that highly
intelligent people also have supersensory discrimination.
But studies in the
subsequent decades have found only a modest connection between
IQ-test scores and people’s ability to quickly or accurately spot
motion in images.
Tadin and his
colleagues were studying a separate question on visual perception in
12 participants when they found something striking: IQ seemed to be
correlated strongly with performance on a visual task.
The test asked users
to spot the direction of motion on a series of black-and-white
stripes on a screen. Sometimes, the lines formed inside a small
central circle, and other times, they were large stripes that took up
the entire screen. Participants also completed a short IQ test.
The team noticed that
people with higher IQs were good at spotting motion in the small
circles, but terrible at detecting motion in the larger
black-and-white stripes.
Because they had
looked at so few people, Tadin and his colleagues wondered if their
results were a fluke. They repeated the experiment with 53 people,
who also took a full IQ test.
The ability to
visually filter the motion strongly predicted IQ — in fact, motion
suppression (the ability to focus on the action and ignore background
movements) was as predictive of total IQ as individual subsections of
the IQ test itself.
Relevant
information
As people walk, the
background scenery is always changing, so efficient brains may be
better at filtering out this irrelevant visual information. And that
efficiency could be operating across a wide range of tasks, Tadin
said.
"What happens in
brains of high-IQ people is, they're automatically processing motion
of small moving objects efficiently, whereas they're suppressing the
background," Tadin said.
The findings reshape
the conventional view that quick thinking leads to smarts.
"Speedy
processing does matter, but it's only half the story. It's how you
filter out things that are less relevant and focus your speedy
resources on what is important," Tadin said.
Big variation
The study reveals new
insights into brain efficiency and smarts, said Kevin McGrew,
director of the Institute for Applied Psychometrics and owner of
www.themindhub.com.
Even though the link
between IQ and visual filtering was very strong, IQ tests won't be
replaced by motion tracking anytime soon, said McGrew, who was not
involved in the study.
"Their task
accounts for or explains about 50 percent of the IQ scores,"
McGrew told LiveScience. "That is impressive in psychology,
but it still means there is 50 percent of the scores that they're not
explaining."
