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BOB HIRSHON (host):
Visual tracking and IQ. I’m Bob Hirshon and this is Science Update.
How people perform on a simple visual task is a surprisingly correlated with their IQ. This according to University of Rochester neuroscientist Duje Tadin and his colleagues. In the task, objects moving left or right would appear on a screen. The volunteers had to say which way they were moving.
DUJE TADIN (University of Rochester):
And we measured how long the movie has to be on the screen before the subjects can actually tell the motion direction.
HIRSHON:
People with higher I.Q.s could do this much more quickly – if the objects were small. That suggests they’re better at tracking relevant information and filtering out the background – which might help them with all kinds of thinking. Interestingly, when the objects were nearly as large as the background, people with higher I.Q.s actually performed worse – perhaps because tracking the background fights against their abilities. I’m Bob Hirshon for AAAS, the Science Society.