London – According to scientists, fluid intelligence is a crucial factor in human cognition. It helps you respond to unexpected situations, formulate new ideas, and carefully plan your strategy for success. Studies have shown that high fluid intelligence predicts professional prosperity, social mobility, health and longevity, and also correlates with stronger additional cognitive abilities such as memory. Now, new research has mapped the parts of the brain that support our ability to think quickly.
Scientists at University College London explain that fluid intelligence is key to “active thinking,” a complex set of mental processes involved in abstraction, inhibition, judgment, attention, and strategy generation. I’m here. We use fluid intelligence on a daily basis, for example, while driving a car or hosting a dinner party.
“Our findings show for the first time that the right frontal lobe region of the brain is critical for high-level functions involved in fluid intelligence, such as problem-solving and reasoning,” said UCL’s Queen Square Institute. Lead study author Professor Lisa Cipolotti said: of neurology in media releases.
Although modern science largely agrees that fluid intelligence is a key aspect of what makes us human, it remains unclear whether fluid intelligence is a single entity or a collection of cognitive abilities. It remains unclear and the exact nature of the connection with the brain is not yet known.It is also very difficult for scientists to study these issues. To establish which part of the brain is necessary for a particular ability, researchers must study patients with that part missing or damaged.
These so-called ‘lesion-deficit mapping’ studies are not easy to conduct. As such, early studies have mostly used functional imaging (fMRI) techniques, which are not entirely accurate and can be misleading.
Stroke can reveal thought centers in the brain
This latest project, led by the UCL Queen Square Institute of Neurology and UCLH researchers’ National Hospital of Neurology and Neurosurgery, involved a total of 227 patients who had experienced brain tumors or strokes to specific parts of the brain. I was doing it. team is, Raven Advanced Progressive Matrix (APM): The most established test of fluid intelligence.
APM features a variety of multiple-choice visual pattern questions of increasing difficulty. Each problem presents an incomplete pattern of geometric shapes and asks participants to select the missing piece from a set of multiple possible choices.
The researchers then introduced a novel ‘lesion-deficit mapping’ approach that could help disentangle the complex anatomical patterns of common brain injuries such as stroke. The approach chosen by the study’s authors is to map the relationships between brain regions to a mathematical network-like network that describes the tendency of regions to be affected together, either by the disease process itself or by reflection of common cognitive abilities. treated to
This strategy helped the research team disentangle brain maps of cognitive performance from injury patterns, facilitating mapping of different parts of the brain and determining which patients deteriorated on fluid intelligence tasks in response to injury. did.
Brain damage confirms which areas process thoughts
Results indicate that fluid intelligence performance was mostly confined to patients with right frontal lobe lesions, in contrast to a broad set of regions distributed throughout the brain. Alongside brain tumors and stroke, researchers have often seen similar damage in patients with a variety of other neurological conditions, including traumatic brain injury and dementia.
“This supports the use of APM in clinical settings as a way to assess fluid intelligence and identify right frontal lobe dysfunction,” concludes Professor Cipolotti.
“Our approach, which combines a detailed investigation of APM performance in a large sample of patients with novel lesion-deficient mapping, provides important information about the neural underpinnings of fluid intelligence. Deciding how to treat neurological disorders.” It is imperative that we pay more attention to lesion studies to clarify the often-relationships between the brain and cognition.”
The research is published in the journal brain.
