Science/Tech

High IQ Brains Automatically Suppress "Useless" Information in Vision Tests

By Christine Hsu | Update Date: May 23, 2013 12:41 PM EDT

Einstein, Newton and Darwin now have another thing in common. Not only were they geniuses, a new study reveals that their brains may have processed sensory information differently.

Scientists recently discovered that people with high IQ scores process sensory information differently by suppressing "irrelevant" sensory information. 

A new study published in the journal Current Biology revealed that the brains of people with high IQ are automatically more selective when it comes to perceiving objects in motion, and are specifically more likely to suppress larger and less relevant background motion.

"It is not that people with high IQ are simply better at visual perception," researchers Duje Tadin of the University of Rochester said in a news release. "Instead, their visual perception is more discriminating. They excel at seeing small, moving objects but struggle in perceiving large, background-like motions."

For the study, researchers asked participants to watch videos showing moving bars on a computer screen. Participants then had to state whether the bars were moving to the left or to the right.  Researchers measured how long it took participants to correctly perceive the motion.

Researchers found that people with high IQ can detect movement of small objects faster than people with low IQ.  However, researchers found that larger objects produced a different effect with people with high-IQ individuals being slower than low-IQ individuals at perceiving them.

"There is something about the brains of high-IQ individuals that prevents them from quickly seeing large, background-like motions," Tadin said, adding that different kind of sensory processing isn't a conscious strategy but rather something automatic and fundamentally different about they way their brains work.

Researchers said that the findings might help explain why some brains are more efficient than other.  Tadin says it makes sense that higher IQ individuals have "picky" brains because the ability to block out distraction is very useful in a world filled with more information than we can possibly take in. 

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