TEMPO.CO, Jakarta - People with high intelligence have been found to be slower in detecting objects with moving backgrounds. This is because their brain prevents them from receiving unimportant information, said a group of scientists from America. However, people with high IQs have excellent abilities in detecting the movement of small objects. This founding was concluded through an experiment conducted to 53 people, which was publicized in the Current Biology journal.
The research study helped scientists understand what makes a brain more efficient and smarter. In the research, individuals were asked to watch a video clip that showed black and white bars moving across the computer screen. A few small clips filled the middle of the screen, while the others filled the whole screen.
Research participants were individually asked to identify whether the bars moved to the right or the left. Participants were also asked to participate in an intelligence test. The result showed that people with higher IQs are faster in detecting the movement of the bars when observing the smallest pictures. In contrary, they were slower in detecting movements of bigger pictures.
A scientist that was involved in the research, Michael Melnick from the University of Rochester, stated that the research result was very clear. "From previous research, we expected that all participants would be worse at detecting the movement of large images, but high IQ individuals were much, much worse," he said as quoted by BBC site on May 24.
Melnick explained that in many cases, background movements are less important than objects that move in the forefront, for example in situations when people are driving a car, walking down a hall, or moving eyes to the whole room.
So when a person's IQ increases, so does his capability to block disturbances from moving objects in the background and to concentrate on the forefront.
BBC | ARBA'IYAH SATRIANI
