FAIR USE NOTICE

FAIR USE NOTICE

A BEAR MARKET ECONOMICS BLOG

OCCUPY THE SCIENTIFIC METHOD


This site may contain copyrighted material the use of which has not always been specifically authorized by the copyright owner. We are making such material available in an effort to advance understanding of environmental, political, human rights, economic, democracy, scientific, and social justice issues, etc. we believe this constitutes a ‘fair use’ of any such copyrighted material as provided for in section 107 of the US Copyright Law.

In accordance with Title 17 U.S.C. Section 107, the material on this site is distributed without profit to those who have expressed a prior interest in receiving the included information for research and educational purposes. For more information go to: http://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/17/107.shtml

If you wish to use copyrighted material from this site for purposes of your own that go beyond ‘fair use’, you must obtain permission from the copyright owner.

FAIR USE NOTICE FAIR USE NOTICE: This page may contain copyrighted material the use of which has not been specifically authorized by the copyright owner. This website distributes this material without profit to those who have expressed a prior interest in receiving the included information for scientific, research and educational purposes. We believe this constitutes a fair use of any such copyrighted material as provided for in 17 U.S.C § 107.

Read more at: http://www.etupdates.com/fair-use-notice/#.UpzWQRL3l5M | ET. Updates
FAIR USE NOTICE FAIR USE NOTICE: This page may contain copyrighted material the use of which has not been specifically authorized by the copyright owner. This website distributes this material without profit to those who have expressed a prior interest in receiving the included information for scientific, research and educational purposes. We believe this constitutes a fair use of any such copyrighted material as provided for in 17 U.S.C § 107.

Read more at: http://www.etupdates.com/fair-use-notice/#.UpzWQRL3l5M | ET. Updates

All Blogs licensed under Creative Commons Attribution 3.0

Wednesday, May 29, 2013

Less is more for smart perception




Less is more for smart perception

 
 

Brains of high-IQ people automatically ignore the least relevant sights




People with high IQs see the world in their own way. Their brains seamlessly separate the visual wheat from the chaff, allowing them to home in on the most relevant information, a new study finds.

Using a simple visual exercise, a team led by psychologist Duje Tadin of the University of Rochester in New York found that high-IQ volunteers excelled at detecting the direction in which small objects moved but struggled at tracking large moving objects.

That’s a useful trait, the scientists report May 23 in Current Biology. In many situations, small moving objects in the foreground are more important to track than background activity. But whether people are driving a car, walking down a street or writing on a computer in an open workspace, their visual field includes humans and objects in the background that are in constant motion.

Among participants in the new study, the lower the IQ, the less able a person was to spot movements of small objects, but the better able to monitor large objects.
Both perception and intelligence thrive on an involuntary neural knack for detecting relevant information and filtering out the rest, Tadin says. “It’s not a conscious strategy but something automatic and fundamentally different about the way the brains of high-IQ individuals work.”

The new findings fit with evidence gathered over the past 25 years that the brains of people with high IQs and expertise in particular activities work more efficiently than other people’s brains, says psychologist and intelligence researcher Richard Haier of the University of California, Irvine. “More does not necessarily mean better when it comes to brain processing,” he says.

Tadin’s group asked 65 volunteers, with IQs ranging from around 80 to 140, to watch videos in which moving black and white bars repeatedly flashed on the screen. The goal was to identify, as quickly as possible, whether the bars were moving right or left. The bars appeared in three sizes, with the smallest version shown in a central circle where human motion perception is known to be especially good.

Volunteers had no chance to decide consciously whether to focus on bars of particular sizes, Tadin says. Random presentations of rapidly flashed bars of different sizes forced the brain to track movements unconsciously.

Researchers have long reported a modest tendency of high-IQ individuals to perform well on simple visual and other sensory tasks. In Tadin’s study, conducting separate tests with small and large moving objects produced much stronger associations with IQ.


M.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.

Tadin lab website. [Go to]
B. Bower. Brain clues to energy-efficient learning. Science News. Vol. 141, April 4, 1992, p. 215. Available online: [Go to]

No comments:

Post a Comment