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 “general fluid intelligence”(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…
