A team of researchers has recognized the areas of the brain that allow us to resolve issues without prior experience, likewise known as fluid intelligence. This type of intelligence is thought about to be a crucial aspect of human cognition and is linked to a variety of cognitive capabilities, consisting of memory, as well as instructional and expert success, social movement, health, and longevity. Fluid intelligence is included in “active thinking,” which includes psychological processes like abstraction, judgment, attention, strategy generation, and inhibition.
Fluid intelligence is perhaps the specifying function of human cognition. The new research study, led by UCL Queen Square Institute of Neurology and National Hospital for Neurology and Neurosurgery at UCLH researchers and published in the journal Brain, investigated 227 clients who had actually suffered either a brain growth or stroke to specific parts of the brain, using the Raven Advanced Progressive Matrices (APM): the best-established test of fluid intelligence.
A team of researchers has recognized the locations of the brain that enable us to solve problems without previous experience, likewise referred to as fluid intelligence. This kind of intelligence is considered to be an essential aspect of human cognition and is connected to a variety of cognitive abilities, including memory, as well as academic and expert success, social movement, health, and longevity. Fluid intelligence is associated with “active thinking,” that includes psychological procedures like abstraction, judgment, attention, technique generation, and inhibition.
A group led by University College London (UCL) and University College London Hospitals (UCLH) researchers has actually mapped the parts of the brain that support our ability to solve issues without prior experience– otherwise referred to as fluid intelligence.
Fluid intelligence is arguably the defining feature of human cognition. It predicts professional and academic success, social movement, health, and durability. It also correlates with numerous cognitive abilities such as memory.
Fluid intelligence is believed to be a crucial function associated with “active thinking”– a set of complex psychological procedures such as those associated with abstraction, judgment, attention, strategy generation, and inhibition. These abilities can all be used in daily activities– from arranging a supper party to submitting a tax return.
In spite of its central role in human habits, fluid intelligence stays controversial, with regard to whether it is a single or a cluster of cognitive capabilities, and the nature of its relationship with the brain.
To establish which parts of the brain are essential for a particular capability, researchers must study clients in whom that part is either missing out on or harmed. Such “lesion-deficit mapping” studies are difficult to carry out owing to the difficulty of identifying and testing patients with focal brain injury.
Previous research studies have generally utilized functional imaging (fMRI) techniques– which can be deceptive.
The new study, led by UCL Queen Square Institute of Neurology and National Hospital for Neurology and Neurosurgery at UCLH researchers and released in the journal Brain, examined 227 clients who had suffered either a brain tumor or stroke to particular parts of the brain, utilizing the Raven Advanced Progressive Matrices (APM): the best-established test of fluid intelligence. The test consists of multiple-choice visual pattern problems of increasing trouble. Each issue presents an insufficient pattern of geometric figures and requires choice of the missing out on piece from a set of several possible choices.
The scientists then introduced a novel “lesion-deficit mapping” method to disentangle the detailed physiological patterns of typical types of brain injury, such as stroke.
Their approach treated the relations between brain areas as a mathematical network whose connections explain the tendency of areas to be affected together, either due to the fact that of the disease process or in reflection of typical cognitive ability.
This allowed scientists to disentangle the brain map of cognitive capabilities from the patterns of damage– allowing them to map the different parts of the brain and identify which patients did even worse in the fluid intelligence task according to their injuries.
The scientists found that fluid intelligence impaired performance was largely restricted to patients with right frontal sores– instead of a wide set of areas dispersed throughout the brain. Alongside brain tumors and stroke, such damage is often found in patients with a variety of other neurological conditions, consisting of terrible brain injury and dementia.
Lead author, Professor Lisa Cipolotti (UCL Queen Square Institute of Neurology), said: “Our findings show for the very first time that the ideal frontal regions of the brain are important to the high-level functions associated with fluid intelligence, such as analytical and reasoning.
” This supports the use of APM in a medical setting, as a way of examining fluid intelligence and determining best frontal lobe dysfunction.
” Our approach of combining unique lesion-deficit mapping with detailed examination of APM performance in a large sample of clients offers vital details about the neural basis of fluid intelligence. More attention to lesion studies is necessary to uncover the relationship between the brain and cognition, which often determines how neurological conditions are treated.”
Recommendation: “Graph lesion-deficit mapping of fluid intelligence” by Lisa Cipolotti, James K Ruffle, Joe Mole, Tianbo Xu, Harpreet Hyare, Tim Shallice, Edgar Chan and Parashkev Nachev, 28 December 2022, Brain.DOI: 10.1093/ brain/awac304.
The study was funded by Welcome and the NIHR UCLH Biomedical Research Centre funding plan. Researchers also got financing from The National Brain Appeal and the Guarantors of Brain.