Focus on Visual Details Linked to Higher IQs

The inability of a person to see the "big picture" may in fact indicate higher intelligence, a new study has found.

A visual test conducted by researchers at the University of Rochester in New York revealed test subjects known  to have comparably high intelligence quotients, or, IQs, showed they had poor, perhaps even impaired, abilities to see large motions.

The findings, published in the journal Current Biology, suggest a tendency in those with higher intelligence to focus on smaller, key details in a given situation, frequently at the cost of less relevant matters.

Put another way, one's ability to efficiently observe details appears to help determine intelligence.

"Rather than raw processing power, the ability to focus on relevant details is what we see in really efficient brains," Duje Tadin a University of Rochester neuroscientist and one of the study's lead investigators, told USA Today. "It's a little like opening up your e-mail every day and zooming in on the important message and focusing on that task to succeed."

Tadin and his colleagues performed two series of tests on 67 people who scored an average of 100 on IQ tests administered by the study research team.

The study subjects watched movies of circular grids, large and small, that appeared to move to the left or right. Test takers were asked how many frames of the movie they needed to see to detect the motion.

Rather than detecting motions any faster, the test-takers actually demonstrated large difference between the time it took them to motion on the small and the time it took for them to perceive motion on the larger one.

"The brain is suppressing automatically the irrelevant larger motion, but zooming in on the small ones," Tadin said. "We don't think this will work with every visual effect...I suspect that if we found a visual test where noticing the large motion was important, then the high IQ scorers would notice that first."

Neuroscientist Steven Rose of the United Kingdom's Gresham College London expressed caution about taking the visual test results too far, the USA Today report said.

"Suppose that IQ isn't about intelligence at all but is simply a test which draws on focused sensory discrimination," Rose suggested in an e-mail. "That would be great. Then we could stop talking about IQ as if it were some absolute measure of 'intelligence' but instead as a way of measuring" people's sensory acuity, which is "surely a useful attribute, but nothing so grand as general intelligence."