Journal
CURRENT BIOLOGY
Volume 23, Issue 11, Pages 1013-1017Publisher
CELL PRESS
DOI: 10.1016/j.cub.2013.04.053
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Funding
- National Institutes of Health [EY019295]
- [P30 EY001319]
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Early psychologists, including Galton, Cattell, and Spearman, proposed that intelligence and simple sensory discriminations are constrained by common neural processes, predicting a close link between them [1, 2]. However, strong supporting evidence for this hypothesis remains elusive. Although people with higher intelligence quotients (IQs) are quicker at processing sensory stimuli [1-5], these broadly replicated findings explain a relatively modest proportion of variance in IQ. Processing speed alone is, arguably, a poor match for the information processing demands on the neural system. Our brains operate on overwhelming amounts of information [6, 7], and thus their efficiency is fundamentally constrained by an ability to suppress irrelevant information [8-21]. Here, we show that individual variability in a simple visual discrimination task that reflects both processing speed and perceptual suppression [22] strongly correlates with 10. High-IQ individuals, although quick at perceiving small moving objects, exhibit disproportionately large impairments in perceiving motion as stimulus size increases. These findings link intelligence with low-level sensory suppression of large moving patterns background-like stimuli that are ecologically less relevant [22-25]. We conjecture that the ability to suppress irrelevant and rapidly process relevant information fundamentally constrains both sensory discriminations and intelligence, providing an information-processing basis for the observed link.
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