The ability to detect motion and filter out distractions is a better indicator of intelligence, a new study says. Researchers found that a person's intelligence can be tested via a simple task that requires the ability to focus on motion.
A recent study on IQ tests had suggested that these tests don't accurately measure a person's intelligence as there are different types of intelligence and also because most tests are culturally biased.
However, the new study suggests that the ability to detect motion is universal and a person who can keep the "background noises" away when arriving at a decision has a higher intellectual capacity than others.
The present study was conducted by researchers from the University of Rochester and is published in the journal Current Biology.
"Because intelligence is such a broad construct, you can't really track it back to one part of the brain. 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," said Duje Tadin, a senior author of the study and an assistant professor of brain and cognitive sciences at the University of Rochester.
In the study, 12 participants were asked to look at a monitor that had large and small versions of white and black bars. The participants had to just say whether the lines were moving to the left or the right.
Study results showed that when participants were shown the smaller bars, the people with the highest intelligence were able to detect the motion of the lines faster than others.
"Being 'quick witted' and 'quick on the draw' generally go hand in hand," said Melnick in a news release.
However, when people were shown the larger bars, the highly intelligent of the lot were the worse performers on the test.
The study authors say that the brain constantly filters out information present in the background to concentrate on the finer details in the foreground.
The study found a "strong correlation of 64 percent between motion suppression and IQ scores." The correlation was so surprising that the researchers thought they'd made an error.
The researchers then re-conducted the study with 53 subjects at the University of Rochester. And, this time, the subjects were given the complete IQ test instead of the abridged version given to participants of the earlier experiment. This time the correlation was 71 percent.
Researchers also accounted for participants' biases to concentrate on the smaller images, but still found that highly intelligent people performed badly in tasks that suppressed motion recognition.