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Science

Your Visual Skills Are Not Correlated To Your IQ (vanderbilt.edu) 160

Science_afficionado writes: Psychologists at Vanderbilt University have conducted the first study of individual variation in visual ability. They have discovered that there is a broad range of differences in people's capability for recognizing and remembering novel objects and this ability is not associated with individuals' general intelligence, or IQ.
Or, as the article puts it, "Just because someone is smart and well-motivated doesn't mean he or she can learn the visual skills needed to excel at tasks like matching fingerprints, interpreting medical X-rays, keeping track of aircraft on radar displays or forensic face matching."

Your Visual Skills Are Not Correlated To Your IQ

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  • by Anonymous Coward

    This is not new information. Millennials should be banned from science until they are at least 45. They 'discover' the already discovered with alarming regularity, and for some reason feel compelled to publish their 'findings'. Newsflash: science is not instagram. It'd be a freaking miracle if they read an old book or paper (formerly known as 'research') instead of conducting their endless science fair projects. Newsflash #2: refusing to acknowledge the work of others is not the same thing as independence,

    • refusing to acknowledge the work of others is not the same thing as independence, especially not independence of *thought*.

      Yet your post is contains unsupported assertions, no citations, and you acknowledge the work of nobody.

  • What a surprise! Anybody who keeps informed has known for a long time that “IQ” was meaningless, and that IQ tests only evaluated the ability to succeed at IQ tests, nothing related to any kind of intelligence whatsoever.

    • Is that what you took away from that?

      Interesting, and a bit ironic given the subject matter.

    • by Anonymous Coward

      I take it then that you didn't like your score.

      IQ tests aren't meaningless, they're just not the solution to every question about intelligence. They're mainly useful in measuring things relevant to formal education before all the new changes.

      I have a high IQ and I can tell you that it's not meaningless, it's just not what people think it is. I can push far more data than anybody else I've met before going crosseyed and I can count cards with the best of them using my own system.

      As for visual skills the test

      • Intelligence also manifests in a number of different areas, from mathematics to politics. Spend some time with a cohort of people who have scored high on IQ tests, and you will see what I mean.

      • by arth1 ( 260657 )

        IQ tests aren't meaningless, they're just not the solution to every question about intelligence. They're mainly useful in measuring things relevant to formal education before all the new changes.

        Actually, no. IQ is a measure of how good you are, compared to your age group, at solving unfamiliar problems applying common knowledge all test takers are expected to have, or knowledge given by the test itself. The education level should not influence the score at all - if it does, the test is flawed.

        What's expected common knowledge differs for age groups. A six year old can be expected to know that water flows downwards, while a sixteen year old can be expected to know about exceptions like siphons a

        • But that does not mean that the education level is the cause.

          What happens if a 6 year old goes to an accelerated education program, and learns about siphons and capillary actions, and which edge of a shingle to seal ? Wouldn't she be able to answer the questions for the 16 year old ?

          And what if the 16 year old grew in a country where they don't use shingles for roofing, but clay tiles ? Would they know which edge to seal ?

          • by Anonymous Coward

            IQ tests made in the last 30 years have no knowledge questions and are designed by teams of scientists to be culture-fair. Nothing that you have said is on any IQ test. Perhaps online quizzes called IQ tests, but those are not made by neuroscientists.

            Perhaps read up on them before embarrassing yourself further.

          • by arth1 ( 260657 )

            What happens if a 6 year old goes to an accelerated education program, and learns about siphons and capillary actions, and which edge of a shingle to seal ? Wouldn't she be able to answer the questions for the 16 year old ?

            Your question breaks down at the "and".
            1: If she learns about siphons and capillary actions to the same level as a 16 year old, she should be able to deduce the same answers as the 16 year old. The 16-year old test question would be appropriate for her too, but not for her contemporaries that lack this knowledge. Thus it won't be asked, unless it's a personalized test.
            2: If she learns about which edge of a shingle to seal, she should not be asked the question, and it should not be counted. It would be

            • You say all that, but actually rich parents send their kids to tutoring designed to increase the scores by studying the types of knowledge that would allow for scoring high on the test without deducing anything.

              And many of the questions actually have wrong answers if you're deducing the answer, because the required answers are the same wrong things you'll find in a "n Lies My Teacher Told Me" type of book! There were other kids giving the correct answer and being scored as wrong all along, and the reason it

            • 2: If she learns about which edge of a shingle to seal, she should not be asked the question, and it should not be counted. It would be as invalid whether answered by a knowledgable 6 year old or by a 50 year old roof layer.

              It's the ability to deduce an answer that the tests aim for, not knowledge. In order to test the ability to deduce, questions should be about things the question taker does not know, but have enough underlying knowledge to be able to think their way to an answer.

              That is an excellent textbook answer as to how an "intelligence test" ought to be designed. But where the rubber meets the road, standard instruments are standard instruments. No one ever does a detailed pre-test of each subject to figure out if certain questions might be problematic. If the subject is showing a confused look on their face, the test administrator is bias towards assuming that demonstrates the question is working the way it should, not rock the boat with questions about whether their chos

    • by epine ( 68316 )

      Anybody who keeps informed has known for a long time that âoeIQâ was meaningless, and that IQ tests only evaluated the ability to succeed at IQ tests, nothing related to any kind of intelligence whatsoever.

      I have kept one eye on IQ research over several decades, and this is not what anyone seriously involved actually thinks.

      g factor (psychometrics) [wikipedia.org]

      Research in the field of behavioral genetics has established that the construct of g is highly heritable. It has a number of other biological correlate

      • Everybody agrees IQ tests measure something, and everybody agrees there is overlap between what it measures and various traits and outcomes.

        Proving that doesn't advance the argument. At all.

        As to the claim that Feynman would have aced a "valid" IQ test, I think only one side of the argument is going to agree with that. If you read (or watch) his memoirs, he talks about having an IQ score too low to join MENSA!

        He also talks about, he didn't figure out what happened with Challenger what he did was listen to t

    • by Anonymous Coward

      There weren't many people with low IQ in my pde or quantum classes. Statistically, there is a high correlation, so I wouldn't call it meaningless.

    • by Anonymous Coward
      Yeah. What a strange coincidence that exactly the tasks solvable with todays' mindless "AIs", are not related to intelligence. Color me surprised.
    • Anybody who keeps informed has known for a long time that âoeIQâ was meaningless

      Wild guess: 86.

    • by HiThere ( 15173 )

      You overstate the case. IQ is correlated with many useful skills. But it sure hasn't been shown to correlate with others.

      For that matter, IQ itself is not a unitary measure. The tests measure different, and perhaps independent (but certainly not varying identically) capabilities. Sometimes the capabilities are correlated, but not identical, as, e.g., the ability to maintain focus and the ability to memorize. But as I know of no accepted separation of the capabilities measured by IQ, I doubt that there'

    • by Sique ( 173459 )
      This is simply wrong. Measured IQ is the best predictor for scholarly success, better even than any social factors like the education level of the parents parents, personal wealth or stability of the family.

      This shoudn't come as a surprise, as the first IQ was invented by Alfred Binet to work as a test for school children to sort them in the right class.

      • If it were only named "Scholar Quotient", it might have been less likely to be an abused notion. But having attached the word "intelligence" to this kind of testing early on, it has been abused. And thus it is rightly challenged as meaning much less than most people think it means.
    • That's the part I'm wondering. Maybe somebody willing to read the article can tell me. The summary says, "this ability is not associated with individuals' general intelligence, or IQ."

      My question in, since when the fuck did anybody invent a useful test of general intelligence?! That is a way more exceptional claim than there being a lack of correlation between IQ and visual object memory.

      I'd also be a lot more interested in visual classification vs IQ than visual object memory. Especially if the click-line

  • by Anonymous Coward

    IQ must not be allowed to correlate to any positive traits whatsoever. Whites have higher IQs than blacks and, because whites and blacks must not be allowed to be unequal in anything*, the stated result is a necessary conclusion.

    * Unless the difference favors blacks. Then, and only then, must the difference be reiterated ad infinity in all forms of mainstream media. This is necessary to emphasize and underscore the striking equality of blacks and whites.

  • Regardless of your intelligence, you can greatly enhance your visual skills by playing video games. Some games are better for this than others.

  • by rmdingler ( 1955220 ) on Sunday November 12, 2017 @10:33AM (#55535311) Journal

    The most important thing to remember is that IQ tests are neither meaningless nor harbingers of all types of intelligence.

    There are several 'recognized' intelligences, and arguably many more.

    words (linguistic intelligence), numbers or logic (logical-mathematical intelligence), pictures (spatial intelligence), music (musical intelligence), self-reflection (intrapersonal intelligence), physical experience (bodily-kinesthetic intelligence), and social experience (interpersonal intelligence).

    • Re: (Score:3, Insightful)

      The only reason we say this is that intelligence tests show that all the wrong kinds of people are intelligent. Thus the resort to "storytelling intelligence" and other nonsense. Intelligence is correlated with every kind of positive life outcome, while lack of intelligence is correlated with every kind of negative outcome. This unacceptable political outcome is why scientists say "heritability stops at the neck" bowing to the extreme social punishments for anyone who dares speak out.
      • by sound+vision ( 884283 ) on Sunday November 12, 2017 @12:17PM (#55535729) Journal
        You're assuming there is some singular RPGesque attribute called Intelligence which governs every decision a person makes. Physically, that would manifest itself as something like more robust connections between brain neurons... I just pulled that out of my ass, but if there's a better explanation for the mechanism that governs singular intelligence, I'd love to hear it.

        The other view is that "intelligence" refers to aptitude for a particular task. To me, that model more accurately describes what we see. You see people who pass calculus with honors, but they can't determine what to say to potential dates. You see people who can balance the books of their company, but they fail to grasp the basic principles (rules and physics) of driving. You see people who can design and build houses, but they can't give you a geopolitical analysis of the wars in Afghanistan. Even when all these people have access to the same information.

        There is no doubt that a person's DNA can affect their aptitudes for these various tasks. But when you say there is some singular variable that raises or lowers all these aptitudes simultaneously, that seems like a coarse simplification. Ignoring the nuances does a disservice to your understanding.
        • Intelligence is potential, or aptitude, or how long it takes to acquire skill. One can be less intelligent but more skilled, by dint of greater application, spending more time on the problem. All of the examples you gave are around people who developed skill in one area but not another, which is completely irrelevant and orthogonal to intelligence. Intelligence measures how quickly someone will acquire a skill if they invest themselves in doing so.

          The concept of multiple intelligences has panned out as

        • I know you said you just pulled that out of your ass, but you're actually correct. IQ does appear to have a basis in physiology. Peripheral nerve speed is strongly correlated to IQ. That's basically the robustness of the speed of connections between neurons as you stated. You can give someone a reflex test and fairly reliable judge their intelligence based on that alone. I shouldn't have to state that a correlation isn't perfect, and there are exceptions. I'm sure someone will come out with an anecdotal c
          • Of course, one of the beautiful things about claims about general intelligence being general is it should not matter what subject matter is used for the test.

            Why should we use this boring book learning to assess children? We should teach the subjects a new dance routine and see how quickly they can learn it. I would love to see the kids from Palo Alto HS line up next to kids from Oakland on the auditorium stage, to shimmy for their chance to get into Harvard.

            The bottom line is the IQ test is culturally bi

      • You're not wrong. Even within the framework of accepted definitions of intelligence, there have been social attempts to marginalize traditional intelligence to make everyone feel better about themselves. It's the participation trophy of life.

        Still, even within the confines of intelligence as the ability to acquire, store, recall, and apply knowledge and skills, there are different subsets of intellect that vary greatly amongst even most mentally acute. There are observable differences in individual abiliti

      • That can all be true and yet if the standard deviation is high, it doesn't tell you shit anyways because in real life you usually deal with individuals rather than averages.

    • by fche ( 36607 )

      Those "recognized" intelligences are BS invented to make the less-intelligent feel better about themselves.

    • But you can't make them smart.

      I recently left an R&D group that gave its operation over to a megalomaniacal "Key Expert".

      This guy insisted on reinventing the wheel badly every time, because he had never actually built anything himself, or done anything IRL.

      He could quote any formula, but was sadly unaware of reality.

      There's a lot of those in America, which is why foreigners who can easily take their jobs and do better at them.
      And why the idiots are afraid of immigrants...

    • There are several 'recognized' intelligences, and arguably many more.

      No there aren't. People will try and tell you that to make themselves sound better than they are, but that's part of the test. Intelligence is logical, abstract problem solving ability. eg Being a body builder isn't physical intelligence, nor is mowing the lawns, grass cutting intelligence.

    • by gdr ( 107158 )
      Do these intelligences have a positive correlation with IQ? I would imagine that they do. What is interesting about this "visual intelligence" is that is is not correlated with IQ. I can't think of any other ability generally associated with intelligence that doesn't have a positive correlation with IQ. But I'm happy to be corrected on that.
  • There's no reason to expect any correlation between intelligence and a skill - any skill. These people might be shocked to learn that there are quite a few very highly intelligent people who can't fly fish, either.

  • by Anonymous Coward

    Everyone knows that visual centers have no correlation with IQ. In fact, autistic people excel in certain tasks that no high IQ person can do. And obviously just because you are blind it does not mean you will have low IQ.

  • Intelligence is our primary survival tool. Other living things have claws, teeth, camouflage, speed, etc. Our secondary survival tools include our senses, including vision, and hands and various motor skills including the ability to run like hell.

    To the extent that we survive and excel in our environment and achieve our goals, we can be said to be intelligent. I don't understand the TFS' association of visual memory with intelligence. Visual memory as described is probably a good thing, but even total blind

    • by HiThere ( 15173 )

      The problem with that argument is that "intelligence" is an undefined term, unless you are arguing that IQ is intelligence, I which case I deny your original assertion.

      What people have that has been our mainstay of success is culture. Human culture depends on language, though it clearly includes a lot of other things too. (Various monkeys and apes have been shown to have a primitive culture, but without language cultural transmission is labored and limited.) And unlike intelligence, what culture is at th

  • Duh! (Score:4, Interesting)

    by nospam007 ( 722110 ) * on Sunday November 12, 2017 @11:55AM (#55535645)

    "Just because someone is smart and well-motivated doesn't mean he or she can learn the visual skills needed to excel at tasks like matching fingerprints, interpreting medical X-rays, keeping track of aircraft on radar displays or forensic face matching."

    In other news:

    Just because someone is smart and well-motivated doesn't mean he or she can learn to run fast.
    Just because someone is smart and well-motivated doesn't mean he or she can learn to shoot accurately.
    Just because someone is smart and well-motivated doesn't mean he or she can learn to paint.
    Just because someone is smart and well-motivated doesn't mean he or she can learn to play a music instrument.
    ---

  • by Jim Sadler ( 3430529 ) on Sunday November 12, 2017 @12:11PM (#55535699)
    A developed, specific skill is not the same as general skills. Duh ! That is about like saying that a person who is a musical genius might not do well with foreign languages. There are all kinds of abilities and as the savants demonstrate one can be a super genius in one area and unable to walk to the corner store and return home without being totally lost. There are also some really challenging tests with the colored blocks that psychologists have used for decades. Being able to remember the colors and geometries of all six sides of a cubs and solve a complex puzzle quickly can be more strenuous than many test subjects can tolerate.
    • Exactly. You could have an impressive IQ and yet if you didn't like being told what to do or working with others you might never get anywhere in life. Conversely you could be a complete moron and become President of the United States. Has been proved twice in the past twenty years.
    • In intelligence studies, there is a widely known concept of "general intelligence" or the g-factor [wikipedia.org]. Basically, studies show that all of the different classes of intelligence (musical, mathematical, linguistic, etc.) are correlated to some extent. It can be interpreted as the master clock frequency of your brain, but as with different CPU architectures, it doesn't explain all of the differences in intelligence.

      To me, the article seemed to imply there's absolutely no correlation between visual and other sk

      • Almost everybody agrees that there is a thing described as "general intelligence." That much is clear. But the claim that the "g-factor" describes general intelligence is dubious; and the link you gave says it is only even claimed to account for "40 to 50 percent of the between-individual performance differences on a given cognitive test." So everybody agrees that there is a thing called "general intelligence," and everybody agrees we don't have a measure for it yet. ;)

  • It has long been known that memory of the arbitrary is uncorrelated with IQ.

  • If you have perfect pitch hearing you might be good at tennis. But equally, you might be bad at it.

  • I mean to answer phones at a help desk role surely requires the right answer like do you own a shed with a drafting table and how quickly you can organize puzzle pieces questions in 3 mins.

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