BEING able to resist distractions may be a key component of intelligence.
Jeremy Gray at Washington University in St Louis, Missouri, and his colleagues tested the reasoning and problem-solving abilities, dubbed 鈥済eneral fluid intelligence鈥�(gF) of 48 people. Volunteers were then shown a series of images and at each new showing were asked to recall which picture they had seen exactly three images earlier. Gray and his team used an fMRI scan to watch how their brains coped with the task, especially when images shown two or four slots earlier were thrown in to complicate things.
The researchers found that during the trials with the most distractions, there were big differences between how well people did. Those volunteers with higher gF scores were faster and more accurate at the task. They also had greater brain activity in certain parts of the brain, such as the prefrontal cortex, suggesting that overcoming distractions may be related to general intelligence (Nature Neuroscience, DOI: 10.1038/nn1014). 鈥淪mart people are smart, but why are they smart? We鈥檙e starting to investigate that,鈥� says Gray.
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