According to a new study led by Dr Michael Melnick from the University of Rochester, people with high IQ scores aren’t just more intelligent, they also process sensory information differently.

A simple test developed by the researchers is the first purely sensory assessment to be strongly correlated with IQ and may provide a non-verbal and culturally unbiased tool for scientists seeking to understand neural processes associated with general intelligence.

“Because intelligence is such a broad construct, you can’t really track it back to one part of the brain,” explained senior author Dr Duje Tadin, also from the University of Rochester.

“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.”

The discovery, reported in the journal Current Biology, was made by asking people to watch videos showing moving bars on a computer screen. Their task was to state whether the bars were moving to the left or to the right.

The team measured how long the video had to run before the individual could correctly perceive the motion.

The findings show that individuals with high IQ can pick up on the movement of small objects faster than low-IQ individuals can.

“That wasn’t unexpected. The surprise came when tests with larger objects showed just the opposite: individuals with high IQ were slower to see what was right there in front of them,” Dr Tadin said.

“There is something about the brains of high-IQ individuals that prevents them from quickly seeing large, background-like motions. In other words, it isn’t a conscious strategy but rather something automatic and fundamentally different about the way their brains work.”

“That ability to block out distraction could come in very handy in a world filled with more information than we can possibly take in. It helps to explain what makes some brains more efficient than others.”

“An efficient brain has to be picky,” Dr Tadin concluded.

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Bibliographic information: Michael D. Melnick et al. A Strong Interactive Link between Sensory Discriminations and Intelligence. Current Biology, published online May 23, 2013; doi: 10.1016/j.cub.2013.04.053