Your Brain's Motion Quotient

A study at the University of Rochester in New York has found that individuals whose brains are better at automatically suppressing background motion perform better on IQ tests. As a person’s IQ increases, so too does his or her ability to filter out distracting background motion, with a correlation of 71 percent. By comparison, research on the relationship between intelligence and color discrimination, sensitivity to pitch, and reaction times have found only a 20 to 40 percent correlation. This 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. However, in life you often give up something to get something. When presented with larger images, the higher a person’s IQ, the slower they were at detecting movement. According to the researchers, the counter-intuitive inability to perceive large moving images is a perceptual marker for the brain’s ability to suppress background motion.