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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.
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
Try the test before reading the article:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=qxt2Uo_GuXI
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?
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
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."
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.
Yeah, but intelligence can also determine the external context.
Intelligent -> working in a patent office.
Unintelligent -> falling into red-hot magma.
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.
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.
'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.
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!
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
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! (^_^)
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I had better change my cat's name to Einstein.
No brain, no pain.
No, he was merely gifted until he published those four groundbreaking papers in 1905 that took the world by storm. Prior to that he had certainly proved himself to be smart enough to warrant, you know, college tuition. Even at the age of 5 he had shown that he could handle the advanced classes.
The argument is that he wasn't genius until he did something at a genius-level. Before that he was sub-genius, but still damn smart, because he had proved said intelligence through schoolwork and such. You can argue till you're blue in the face about him (or you) being a "potential genius", but the counter-argument that the coward and I would make is that we don't care about potential (or raw-intelligence), only results. If you don't do anything with that super-brain, it doesn't count.
Does that mean that people are getting smarter?
No, just their phones.
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