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US researchers have found that people with higher IQs are slow to detect large background movements because their brains filter out non-essential information.

Instead, they are good at detecting small moving objects.

The findings come in a study of 53 people given a simple, visual test in Current Biology.

The results could help scientists understand what makes a brain more efficient and more intelligent.

In the study, individuals watched short video clips of black and white bars moving across a computer screen. Some clips were small and filled only the centre of the screen, while others filled the whole screen.

The participants’ sole task was to identify in which direction the bars were drifting – to the right or to the left.

Participants also took a standardized intelligence test.

The results showed that people with higher IQ scores were faster at noticing the movement of the bars when observing the smallest image – but they were slower at detecting movement in the larger images.

People with higher IQs are slow to detect large background movements because their brains filter out non-essential information

People with higher IQs are slow to detect large background movements because their brains filter out non-essential information

Michael Melnick of the University of Rochester, who was part of the research team said the results were very clear.

“From previous research, we expected that all participants would be worse at detecting the movement of large images, but high IQ individuals were much, much worse.”

The authors explain that in most scenarios, background movement is less important than small moving objects in the foreground, for example driving a car, walking down a hall or moving your eyes across the room.

As a person’s IQ increases, so too does his or her ability to filter out distracting background motion and concentrate on the foreground.

In an initial study on 12 people, there was a 64% correlation between motion suppression and IQ scores. In this larger study on 53 people, a 71% correlation was found.

In contrast, previous research on the link between intelligence and reaction times, color discrimination and sensitivity to pitch found only a 20-40% correlation.

But the ability to ignore background movements is not the only indicator of intelligence.

“Because intelligence is such a broad construct, you can’t really track it back to one part of the brain,” says Duje Tadin, who also worked on the study.

“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.

“We know from prior research which parts of the brain are involved in visual suppression of background motion.

“This new link to intelligence provides a good target for looking at what is different about the neural processing, what’s different about the neurochemistry, what’s different about the neurotransmitters of people with different IQs.”

Researchers say that interacting within a group, such as taking part in jury deliberations or mingling at a cocktail party, can lower your intelligence, with women being particularly susceptible.

Scientists at Virginia Tech Carilion Research Institute used magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) to investigate how the brain processes information about social status in small groups and how perceptions of that status affect expressions of cognitive capacity.

In other words, whether “feeling” less intelligent than others can affect your decision-making.

“You may joke about how committee meetings make you feel brain dead, but our findings suggest that they may make you act brain dead as well,” said Read Montague, director of the Human Neuroimaging Laboratory and the Computational Psychiatry Unit at the institute, who led the study.

 

Researchers say that interacting within a group, such as taking part in jury deliberations or mingling at a cocktail party, can lower your intelligence

Researchers say that interacting within a group, such as taking part in jury deliberations or mingling at a cocktail party, can lower your intelligence

 

Read Montague explained that when volunteers in a group were told how the others performed, it lowered their problem-solving abilities.

He said: “We started with individuals who were matched for their IQ.

“Yet when we placed them in small groups, ranked their performance on cognitive tasks against their peers, and broadcast those rankings to them, we saw dramatic drops in the ability of some study subjects to solve problems. The social feedback had a significant effect.”

What’s more, a pattern emerged along gender lines.

The women and men both had the same baseline IQ scores, but more women fell into the lower performing group.

Lead author Kenneth Kishida added: “Our study highlights the unexpected and dramatic consequences even subtle social signals in group settings may have on individual cognitive functioning.

“And, through neuroimaging, we were able to document the very strong neural responses that those social cues can elicit.”

Co-author Steven Quartz, a professor of philosophy in the Social Cognitive Neuroscience Laboratory of Caltech, said: “The idea of a division between social and cognitive processing in the brain is really pretty artificial. The two deeply interact with each other.”

The research appears in the January 23, 2012 issue of the journal Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society B.