People having a higher IQ tend to be much more focused, and can avoid distractions better than the rest of us, a new study has found.
Researchers from the University of Rochester took in 53 participants for this study, and asked them to view short video clips of black and white bars, and gave them the task of identifying whether the bars pointed towards the left or the right. The bars included in the videos were either large or managed to fit the screen, or smaller and took up the center of the screen.
"This is the first study I've ever seen that shows that the exact same ability to inhibit irrelevant and distracting information [on low levels] is correlated with higher order functions," Scott Barry Kaufman, adjunct assistant professor of psychology at New York University, said.
The study participants were also asked to take an IQ test, which revealed that the subjects with higher IQ had a bit of difficulty in perceiving larger images, but were quicker to notice the movements in the smaller bars.
So how does the inability to perceive larger bars play a role in intelligence? Well, the larger bars represented distractions, which in real-life scenarios tend to be much less important than important stuff, which in the video, referred to the smaller bars, which they were able to notice quickly.
"The more they struggled with the big ones and the better they were at the small ones, the better their IQ was," Duje Tadin, assistant professor of brain and cognitive sciences at the University of Rochester, explained.
In most scenarios, the authors explain, background movements are less important than small movements in the foreground; for example - a car or people moving in the background. However, merely limiting the brain's ability to ignore background activity as its sole indicator of intelligence and a high IQ may not be enough.
"Because intelligence is such a broad construct, you can't really track it back to one part of the brain," Tadin added. "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."
