A visual optical illusion test has linked the inability to see large motion with higher IQ's, according to USA Today.
IQ tests are considered to be one of the best tests of raw intelligence, however those who score high on the tests are usually impaired at seeing the large motions in the illusion, and experts say this may be the key to intelligence.
"Rather than raw processing power, the ability to focus on relevant details is what we see in really efficient brains," said neuroscientist Duje Tadin of the University of Rochester who led the team that wrote on the study results in the journal Current Biology. "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."
In the study Tadin's team performed two series of tests on 67 people with normal IQ's of about 100. The volunteers watched sets of moving grids, some were large and some were small, and indicated how many frames of the movie they needed to detect the movement.
Tadin observed that the volunteers with higher IQ's didn't take longer to notice the movement, but rather needed more frames to do so.
"We don't think this will work with every visual effect," Tadin said. "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."
"The brain is suppressing automatically the irrelevant larger motion, but zooming in on the small ones," said Tadin.
Neuroscientist Steven Rose of the United Kingdom's Gresham College London is not as sold on the validity of the test and warns that putting too much weight on the idea may be dangerous.
"Suppose that IQ isn't about intelligence at all but is simply a test which draws on focused sensory discrimination," Rose said. "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 how sensorily focused people were - surely a useful attribute, but nothing so grand as general intelligence."
