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Predicting IQ With a Simple Visual Test
New submitter trendspotter writes "Scientists at the University of Rochester found a unique way to measure high IQ and IQ of the brain in general just by studying individuals and their abilities to filter out noise in images (abstract). The results of a visual test where people were told to quickly detect movements showed similar IQ results as a classic intelligence test. 'The relationship between IQ and motion suppression points to the fundamental cognitive processes that underlie intelligence, the authors write. The brain is bombarded by an overwhelming amount of sensory information, and its efficiency is built not only on how quickly our neural networks process these signals, but also on how good they are at suppressing less meaningful information. ... The researchers point out that this vision test could remove some of the limitations associated with standard IQ tests, which have been criticized for cultural bias.'"
Yay, it's an IQ thread.
Cue bragging about IQ followed by arguments about whether IQ measures intelligence.
making popcorn. brb.
SJW n. One who posts facts.
Wouldn't visual defects, such as myopia, or an excess of floaters, impact the results of this exam?
I am John Hurt.
In my books, you're a genius if and only if you've proven yourself to be one; tests like these don't matter. Do something amazing and innovative and I'll at least consider you intelligent. I'm tired of tests that don't test real-world ability or real skills.
I wonder how well this correlates with the IQ of people with Autism. Or with schizophrenics? Both have trouble filtering out stuff, but neither condition lowers IQ.
That's eye-Q, not IQ. :-P
Lost at C:>. Found at C.
Now if we could just find a correlation between IQ and intelligence, we'd easily be able to sort out which humans are worth saving. ... except the one against the blind.
A visual test eliminates the cultural bias
..therefore I have to support my limited brain power with an adblocker.
Try the test before reading the article:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=qxt2Uo_GuXI
No, we just like the pretty, vibrant colors..
Harrison's Postulate - "For every action there is an equal and opposite criticism"
So, over the past 5+ years, people have been migrating away from high quality cameras, and high quality TV sets, to the crappy photo sensors and highly compressed tiny screens of your average smartphone.
Does that mean that people are getting smarter?
I wonder how well the researchers did?
No good deed goes unpunished.
The brain is bombarded by an overwhelming amount of sensory information, and its efficiency is built not only on how quickly our neural networks process these signals, but also on how good they are at suppressing less meaningful information. ...
Hrm.
I don't follow reddit or twitter, so that obviously means I'm quite a bit intelligent already, but on the other hand I do post to slashdot, so maybe my IQ isn't as high as I first thought.
"A government is a body of people usually -- notably -- ungoverned." -Shepherd Book
Something I have been saying for a long time.
IQ as measured today is intelligence applied to details, core structures, _small_ puzzles, etc. It does not measure whether people can identify context, make fuzzy trade-offs, find what is important and what not in complex structures, etc. The testing is also fundamentally broken as it is done under time pressure. In practice, somebody that can figure out a complex problem in 1 week is about as capable as somebody that needs 2 weeks and not far behind is somebody that needs 10 weeks. People really fall into the classes "can do it in reasonable time" and "cannot do it, regardless of time available". Those that can do, but need a lot longer than others that can do are quite rare.
I also have met quite a few people with high IQ, but really low "wisdom" scales that could not use their intelligence effectively as a result. This also explains why the IQ is not a reliable predictor of future success in life, as for example Mensa found out.
Most ACs are not even worth the keystrokes to insult them. Be generically insulted by this and ignored otherwise.
If the test "showed similar IQ results as a classic intelligence test", and the classic test is "biased", wouldn't that mean that this test is biased? Or would it have to mean that the classic test is *not* biased?
They are just completely unable to take this test. I always had my suspicions...
I am a member of a high IQ "society" that discrimatinates against the lowest 99.9% of the general population. Yet, I would do very poorly on this test as my visual processing is poor. I excel in abstract reasoning but do poorly in other areas.
What is intelligence? What is IQ? What is it good for? All good questions.
See my journal for slashdot ID's by year. Mine created in 2005. http://slashdot.org/journal/289875/slashdot-ids-by-year
Presumably, it could be identifying what the classic test is really measuring.
No matter how many times I crossed my eyes, I couldn't see the magic image. Am I doing somethig wrong? But if it's seeing things move, I can get the whole room to move with a bottle of nice single malt. Does that prove that drinking makes you smarter?
Granted, the population size of individuals with measured IQs above 150 is relatively small (about 1 in 1000), but it's a little bit misleading to consider people with IQs in the range below 140 as having "high IQ." 120-140 is "above average," certainly, but fairly common. Being more intelligent than someone scoring 80-100 doesn't automatically mean you have "high IQ." This study shows that intelligence correlates with a specific motion tracking task, but only in the studied IQ range due to the relative difficulty of finding individuals above IQ 150 or below IQ 80.
I think such a study should include age as a predictor as well. It would be interesting to see more data, especially in the higher IQ range from 150 to 180. Above 180, there are too few people in the world who are able to test that high.
Having read the article, I can see how this might sound snotty, but why wouldn't it be easier to detect motion in the small circle? There are more axes of motion than in the bigger view. The big view is almost purely left and right, but by virtue of being a circle, there's a much greater chance to perceive vertical motion as well. It seems like there is, in a sense, more motion to see in the smaller set.
Hmm. I must be far less intelligent that I thought. I always buy non-glossy. Or maybe I just have low narcissism and do not need to see myself all the time.
Most ACs are not even worth the keystrokes to insult them. Be generically insulted by this and ignored otherwise.
Albert Einstein in patent office = Law of Photoelectric Effect.
Albert Einstein in red-hot ' 'magma' ' = "Tssssssh."
Thus external context is of equal importance to innate ability within the expression of intelligence.
Also, when the bars start flicking like that, from one side to another, that's how I know when I've had enough to drink.
Is it International Naked Supermodel Day again?
And here I am with nothing to wear for the occasion.
Oh that's an insulting conclusion.
The fact is, when I use a glossy laptop screen, all I see is myself. It's annoying. Also, I see whatever is going on behind me which is also annoying at times. Being distracted by random events is a sign of lower intelligence? I don't know about that. I tend to be a bit hyper-aware... especially of tiny details. I can't STAND to see a mobile phone with cracks in the the display, for example, while other people seem to have no problem with it as long as it works.
Replace IQ? I think it's a stake in the heart of IQ testing. Being a champ at "Where's Waldo" is not a good predictor of problem solving, imagination, communication and knowledge retention, which are the only real measures of intelligence. Spot-checking pattern recognition skills doesn't tell us much about an individual, apart from "Wow, he matched that pattern he was familiar with because he grew up in the same society as the test designers pretty darn quick. Yup."
Rorschachtester?
You can only be young once, but you can be immature forever.
Interestingly enough, my subjective and anecdotal evidence suggests that stupid people "see" things that aren't there, don't see thing that are there, and generally are governed by that which is immediate in front of them, but are easily distracted by things in the periphery. . Conversely, smarter people are able to see more because they do filter out meaningless things, and the "Squirrel" effect is very brief if at all.
Again, all of that is completely subjective and anecdotal.
Agent K: A *person* is smart. People are dumb, stupid, panicky animals, and you know it.
Much of the brain's visual processing can change dynamically with changes in environment.
For example, a common experiment in college psych courses is to give a student glasses that flip the world upside-down. It takes a few days for the student's brain to adapt to the new inputs, and then they see the world normally (and revert after a few days w/o the glasses). Patients with macular degeneration can wear glasses that stretch-map the visual input around areas of missing vision (in the manner of a cylindrical mirror). After some time, they report seeing the world normally - their visual system has adapted and remapped the input.
I wonder if the effect simply measures the amount of reading the subject does; in other terms, perhaps it's just measuring the amount of fine-focus eye training? What does the test show for people who play a lot of arcade games (shooters, especially ones that throw a lot of targets at you)? Or people who use a lot of visual perception in their daily lives?
The article stated that the authors "tested for other possible explanations". Also, the correlation was at most 71%, note that flipping a coin is expected to correlate to around 50%. Their data seems to be awfully well clustered and the slope seems to be due to the outliers. The first study used 12 subjects, and the second only 53.
I'm unconvinced. It could be promising, but I would like to see correlations from more data.
???
I am very small, utmostly microscopic.
Not sure if anybody has already posted this, but if you'd like to read the article and lack access (and are unwilling to fork over $35) you can read it through the university's website for free: http://www.bcs.rochester.edu/people/Duje/papers/13_Melnick_IQ_CB.pdf
JAGga.me ----> Producing video games addressing emotional health and wellness issues affecting teens.
I was once told that to be able to tell how smart a dog is just throw a blanket over it. The faster it gets out from under it the smarter it is.
Paul: Father... father, the sleeper has awakened! - Dune
'The relationship between IQ and motion suppression points to the fundamental cognitive processes that underlie intelligence'
Or, IQ tests don't test anything but pattern matching / the ability to filter noise in the first place.
That was a fairly easy test, not to mention that when you look at the graphs they show that there is only a rough correlation between IQ and the motion of the circles. All that test really proves is that you know left from right, anyone with the ability to visually separate out patterns will quickly rock the test. The standard IQ test is flawed, there is no doubt in that statement, but I don't think this test is any better.
For an IQ test to work you first need to break down the learning style of the person taking the test, visual, audio or hands on. Then you need to adjust the test to take into account race and culture. Now you have a test that replicates the learning style of the person in question and doesn't apply a basis which would taint the results.
Giving a hands on person a verbal IQ test is pointless, just like giving an audio person a visual test, they might get some question right, most of the questions right or none of the question right, all you've managed to prove is they can either adapt to a new style or they can't, you haven't determined anything about IQ.
People learn differently, if you ask a person who learns with there hands to read a text book and take a test, they probably wont do very well, maybe getting a C ( for example ), well a visual learner might get an A. Now reverse the situation the visual learn will probably get the C and the hands on learner the A. I'm a hands on learner, I have difficulty just reading something and making sense of it, I need to actually apply it in a meaningful way for it to stick. My best friend is the opposite, he can read a textbook in one night and learn the material perfectly. Does that mean he's smarter or has a higher IQ? No of course not! He just is table to learn material in a different fashion and will always rock a test that is given visually. If you ask him to take that same test as a hands on demo, he'll fail, he wont have a clue how to do it. So why give IQ tests this way?
I think IQ tests need to be tailored to the person taking them and not to an outdated standard.
If the test "showed similar IQ results as a classic intelligence test", and the classic test is "biased", wouldn't that mean that this test is biased? Or would it have to mean that the classic test is *not* biased?
It's not a 100% correlation.
I'm sure the difference will shed some light on how and who is biased against in the test.
[Fuck Beta]
o0t!
Some academics like to call jungian/analytical psychology "unscientific", but wasn't this a highly predictable result? According to all jungian theories, the Se (extraverted sensing) and Ne (extraverted intuition) functions are in opposition. Se is associated with high environmental awareness, Ne with brainstorming and more generally high intelligence. This merely confirms scientifically what Jungian based theories already predicted "unscientifically".
". I tend to be a bit hyper-aware"
So? Oh, right you believe that means you are smart.
However, it's actually irrelevant to the test. DId you read the article and watch the test?
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
I find that the lower the IQ the less likely they are to have read the article before making some 'point' about the topic.
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
I played the little sample video and noticed that it was easier with the small circle as my default is to always be focused with very little peripheral vision.
However, when I switched to a wide field of focus, that I had learned from correcting my eyesight, it was now easier to see motion in the big square.
So, perhaps what they really discovered is that motion is more easily detected when size appropriate for your field of view?
Don't complain about syntax, grammar, or spelling. There is no.hell like input on android.
"standard IQ tests, which have been criticized for cultural bias"
The voices who complain about cultural bias will always find a reason that any test is biased, as long as it continues to score their preferred racial/ethnic/economic/victim class lower than their supposed oppressors. If current tests showed that poor African immigrants with little schooling were "more intelligent" than the average middle class white person, the tests would be hailed as scientific evidence of the tyranny of the current social regime.
That said, the classic IQ test is very limited. It does measure one thing pretty well, but just what that thing is isn't well defined--and that thing, while helpful in some ways, is in no way required for a successful, happy life.
or blindness ("Your IQ is zero sir, but luckily your companion dog is smarter than Einstein!"). They've just replaced a culturally biased test with a visually biased one.
Support Right To Repair Legislation.
This also explains why the IQ is not a reliable predictor of future success in life, as for example Mensa found out.
While I don't disagree with your arguments, please define what is "success in life".
From my point-of-view, success comes from luck.
Why would luck be linked to any sort of intelligence ?
Yup... he looks like an idiot, and so does he... why am I surrounded by such morons???
Scottie... beam me up!!
This This is is a a simple simple test test for for double double vision. vision.
OGC OGC
How How many many wankers wankers do do you you see? see?
If If you you answered answered one, one, then then you you do do not not have have double double vision. vision.
No no, that's a very good day to be blind. They're exempt from the societal rule of "look, but don't touch" because touching is their looking.
Now that's funny, I don't care who you are.
Sorry, but this was a secret IQ test- and sadly, you just failed it. There was a hidden pattern within the letters in the original comment, which held a secret message along the lines of "Psst... don't admit this is funny, or you'll look stupid". However, only people with reasonably high IQs are able to spot it.
Also, if anyone else says I'm talking rubbish and it's not there... it's okay. No-one said we all had to be geniuses! (^_^)
"Slashdot - News and Chat Sites Deviant". (Click "homepage" link above for details).
...blind people are stupid?
That's going to be a hard sell.
-Styopa
I had better change my cat's name to Einstein.
No brain, no pain.
You took the IQ test, knowing full well it's mental masturbation. I can expect huge time wastes from you and your ilk. Gimme the idiot savant any day of the week.
IT'S OVER 9000!!!!
Sig. Sig. Sputnik
IQs above 140 are meaningless. At that range you may very well just be good at taking IQ tests. 140 is 4 standard deviations away from the mean, so while many such people exist by virtue of the fact that there are billions of people on the planet, it's a very small number as a ratio to the population.
I noted that the dam pattern could change direction depending on the refresh rate of my screen and speed of the GFX card. Not a good test without tight controls of the hardware.
Truth is stranger than fiction, but it is because Fiction is obliged to stick to possibilities; Truth isn't. Mark Twain.
The results of the tests don't necessarily support the interpretations. IQ tests were devised during the same period when doctors were making fortunes transplanting goat testicles into men to cure impotence. (Dr. John Brinkley and others)... Motion detection is crucial for detecting threats so it must be dealt with very early on, much of that being done in the amygdala, whose work is independent of higher functions. Conscious control over the system is an illusion. Find Wally is a good example. Wally is hard to pick out if his expression is neutral, but we'd catch him immediately if he looked angry. Another good example of the separation of this processing from consciousness is Blindsight... People who are blind due to damage to their visual cortex but can still detect threats despite seeing only blackness.
So how does that effect those of us with dyslexia or other disabilities that effect the visual centers of the brain.
Did anyone else just see still images when they flashed quickly in the middle of the video (not the beginning or the end, when they showed motion for longer periods)? I've always had some weird visual delay issues, but I'm curious if they were really just moving that quickly or if I just perceive that slowly.
So at some point that guy in the mall's brain will filter out the noise and see that damn boat... and then he'll be declared a genius. Rats.
My present is the activity I am currently engaged in with the purpose of turning the future into a better past.
blind people were stupid.
I stole this Sig
Yeah, actually this is 100% stupid. The part of the brain that subtends visual processing is the visual cortex (which itself is broken down into different parts but it's good enough for now) . There has never been shown any relationship between the speed at which it can process visual stimuli (not that that's what's being measured, response times are) and general intelligence. What the researchers are doing is pretending that all "brain stuff" is the same(!!!) and if one part process a particular modality of information fast, then others do also and that speed is what intelligence is.
Jesus there are so many things wrong with this idiotic hypothesis.
For instance, we already know that functionally specific areas of the brain may be more or less independently good at what they do. So someone can have a high level of coordination and fast reaction times but score poorly in reasoning and even reading.
Not only are functionally distinct areas of the brain naturally better or worse at their "jobs" quite independently , but such areas' performance can be enhanced through practice, which enhancement presumably and in some case provably are subtended by an increase in the density of brain cells and connections. So any measurement of performance has to first ask the question- has this area of the brain in this individual been enhanced by the activities of this individual. Failing that,. inter-subject comparisons are meaningful .
Then there's the fact that there's a long long pathway between light being processed in the visual cortex and a response being generated by the subject and there's no reason to suppose that those pathways are all just passively of equal *efficiency* or that the efficiency of those pathways is meaningfully related to intelligence.
To what I am getting at, think how Stephen Hawking would fare in this test of intelligence. We have zero reason to think that pathways negatively effected by ALS are otherwise equally efficient in all individuals, or really, even the same... consider the phenomena of someone who habitually "overthinks" their responses.
Jesus. This is the second "speed = intelligence" article on Slashdot in as many days. Yesterday it was "people are gettting dumber !!!". Do I smell a PR attack with an agenda behind it? IS someone trying to foist the idea that we have a clear and unambiguous way to both define (we don't) and measure (we don't) intelligence so that they can.... profit????
I hate to brag, but... I totally saw this coming.
Simply put: if you don't have a sense of humor, you cannot be considered intelligent.
I don't care how much you know; if you can't laugh, you're barely human.
A person with a high IQ that refuses to work with others may never be a success. Perhaps they don't bath, so you would not want them around? Perhaps they make irrational decisions? Perhaps they are easily duped into performing waste of time tasks because they can not predict outcome?
I have met each of the above, and would not call them a success. While the books say that they have a high IQ, they act and behave more like a savant than a genius.
-The wise argue that there are few absolutes, the fool argues that there are no probabilities.
Do you mean that success is "social success" ?
I can disprove all your arguments easily, since my definition of "success" is quite different.
For example:
- why do you suppose that you cannot succeed alone ? In my experience, the best success is achieved alone, since you deserve all the credit.
- who does not make irrational decisions ? Everybody has a lot of magic thinking in their thought process, like superstition or weird habits.
- what is a waste of time ? I suppose that you watch television, which I consider a waste of time.
It just slept on. Dumb animal. Now excuse me, I got to clean its poop box and go out and work a boring job to earn money so i can by food for my cat and provide for its healthcare so it can live a long live, in human years well into its hundreds while I will be lucky if I reach sixty.
Stupid cat.
MMO Quests are like orgasms:
You may solo them, I prefer them in a group.
Most questions on a "classic intelligence test" (Stanford-Binet, Wechsler, etc) are ultimately pattern-recognition tests, albeit some classes of question (eg the verbal ones) require prior knowledge too. E.g., in the Wechsler tests, the "Perceptual Reasoning", "Working Memory" and "Processing Speed" subtests all include (or benefit from) some pattern extraction/recognition skill, only the "Verbal Comprehension" does not. Whether those tests actually measure those things, let alone "intelligence", is another question entirely. But if there's something in the brain's hardware or firmware that assists that visual processing, chances are it assists in the above tests too. (And yes, I recognize that with visual processing there's also a bunch that gets done in the hardware before the information ever gets to the higher levels.)
Although as the saying goes, IQ is that thing which is measured by IQ tests, and may or may not have any bearing on intelligence. From personal observation, it certainly has no correlation with common sense.
-- Alastair
btw i always thought the definition of IQ (assuming that your group satifies the central limit theorem and we can treat it as a normally distributed sample) was that it was normally distributed with a mean of 100 and standard distribution of 10, simple right..
No, standard deviation is 15 points.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intelligence_quotient/
Journey onward.
Just try filling out one of these silly IQ tests while your wife / GF.
If you manage to get anything higher than 40 you are superhuman (or she just shut up for a minutes, being the probabilities for that infinitesimal)
-- 29A the number of the Beast
I remember seeing (ha!) an interview with neurosurgeon Sid Watkins, who was the head of the Formula One on-track medical team. He was saying how F1 drivers were invariably very intelligent people, and they could process more visual information, and at a much higher rate, compared to average drivers. Seems to tie in with the findings of this study.
Please understand the difference between *correlation* and equivalence.
If you can't tune out the noise in the summary and see that scientists have found [another*] correlation between high IQ "skills", and some more basic biological function, then you are showing that you couldn't filter, and as a result end up wasting time arguing against a point that doesn't exist in the original article.
**another -- nearly 20 years ago scientists measured something similar with how fast brain signals traveled. They exposed people to a light flash and measured how fast the signal propagated through the brain. It, also, showed a correlation between speed of signal travel in the brain and IQ.
To put it another way. Suppose you have a computer that uses Dynamic memory (needs to be refreshed every 'n' cycles, or the data fades). It also has a permanent store, but that's slower memory and used for long-term storage. "Thinking" occurs almost exclusively with stuff that is in the Dynamic memory. The more 'operations' you can perform on Dynamic memory before it needs to be refreshed, the more complex problems you can handle. It's that simple. You can't solve problems if you can't remember the starting point by the time you get to the end point, or you end up asking "what was the question, again?"
If you can't hold the whole problem set in memory and keep it actively stimulated so you can think about the whole problem at once, you can't *easily* see the whole picture and have a "ahHA!" or "light-buld-turns-on" experience regarding the whole.
So, overall, people who can wade through the noise and find the patterns in a mess of input are the ones most likely to come up with what might be a new solution to a problem set.
Doesn't mean that others can't or won't -- but it will take longer, and, statistically it will be less likely.
I think IQ measures potential in that way. Says nothing about whether or not they will use it or have the information needed to make the connections or have the "desire" or "will" to give a task sufficient attention to solve anything. Someone of less IQ-"gifted-ness" may, out of sheer stubbornness or desire, or will can certainly be more creative and invent more solutions to problems.
I can't say for sure, but I think Edison was more the latter kind -- especially given his saying 'genius is 1%inspiration and 99%perspiration'... and he was a prodigious inventor (who (with a bit of hyperbole) sounds like he was saying he had about 10-30 failures for every 1 success...
Vs. Einstein, who could see a larger picture in a new way than most... but isn't known for inventing nearly so many things.
Einstein was likely much higher IQ than Edison... But would would we really have preferred to only have 1 of those 2 types of person?
"[Sir Francis Galton] developed mental tests that were a series of objective measurements of such sensory abilities as keenness of sight, color discrimination, and pitch discrimination; ... Galton's (1869, 1883) theory of intelligence was simplistic; People take in information through their senses, so those with better developed senses ought to be more intelligent."
- IQ Testing 101, Alan S. Kaufman, p.19
Star Trek transporters are just 3d printers.
You define success as something external to yourself.
For me, success is something internal, not external.
Your model of success is based upon celebrity, which is not a good evaluator of success.
No it's not based upon being a celebrity. Einstein and Socrates are hardly celebrities "just because" or because of superficial reasons at you are trying to imply. They both helped society in ways we have difficulty defining, they advanced science tremendously, and obviously understood that their work was a personal success.
Your bias of course makes you believe that you must be correct and everyone else in the world is wrong. I believe that this is the definition of delusional.
-The wise argue that there are few absolutes, the fool argues that there are no probabilities.
Using just the difference between two very simple perceptual tests to get similar results to other IQ tests would imply that the classic tests are not significantly biased in any factor more complex than used in the simple perceptual tests, which effectively means not biased at all. The correlation of the perceptual test with a long-form IQ test was 0.71, which is at or above the typical correlations of different major IQ tests with each other. It seems like the measuring methodology could be improved to eliminate the meaningless peripheral nervous propagation speed (would likely need EEG/EMG), or the almost meaningless non-choice reaction time (which can be done by just subtracting out the minimum repeated non-choice reaction time from pre-tests.)
If they can be improved even slightly, then perceptual tests would be the gold standard for IQ measurements, and even as it is now will be much cheaper and more convenient than traditional tests while being just as accurate for anybody with reasonably good vision and no confounding neurological diseases such as MS.
"Is life so dear, or peace so sweet, as to be purchased at the price of chains and slavery?" - Patrick Henry
The standard deviation for IQ tests is 15, not 10. While the tests become less reliable at a rate proportional to the rarity of the score, nearly all the inaccuracy is in underestimating IQ, and this is a problem with the specific tests, not the concept of general intelligence. If someone has a score of 150IQ, they are nearly certainly that smart. If they have tested twice at that level, they are almost certainly substantially above 150IQ. Due to the 0.65-0.7 correlation of the tests, getting a second 1 in 1000 score on a different IQ test with just a 150 "real" IQ and 1 prior 150 IQ score will only happen about 15% of the time.
The IQ scale compresses vast differences in ability into the highest scores. There is literally more variation in the top 1% than in the 1st-99th percentiles. Nearly all the ideas that really change things come from that top 1%. No number of merely bright 120IQ people can take the place of one person with 160IQ for really hard new thoughts.
"Is life so dear, or peace so sweet, as to be purchased at the price of chains and slavery?" - Patrick Henry