Mittwoch, 16. Januar 2019

Intelligence and neural efficiency:

Aljoscha C. Neubauer, Andreas Fink (2009)


"A well-established finding in the neuroscientific study of human intelligence is that brighter individuals use their brains more efficiently when engaged in the performance of cognitively demanding tasks than less intelligent people do. This phenomenon, referred to as neural efficiency (Haier et al., 1988), has been confirmed in a variety of studies employing different neurophysiological measurement methods and a broad range of different cognitive task demands. In this context, neural efficiency is reflected in a more strongly localized brain activation during cognitive task performance in brighter as compared to less intelligent individuals (Haier et al., 1992; Haier, Siegel, Tang, Abel, & Buchsbaum, 1992; Neubauer, Grabner, Fink, & Neuper, 2005; Neubauer, Fink, & Grabner, 2006). This more strongly focused cortical activation results in a lower total cortical activation and could suggest a more efficient use of the cortex (or even the brain) in brighter individuals — presumably they “use only a limited group of brain circuits and/or fewer neurons, thus requiring minimal glucose use” (Haier et al., 1992, p. 134)."

"in investigating the Event-Related Desynchronization (ERD) of EEG alpha activity Neubauer and Fink (2003) observed evidence that during the performance of a reasoning task neural efficiency (i.e., inverse relationship between brain activation and intelligence) was much more pronounced when fluid intelligence instead of crystallized or general mental ability was taken as a measure of intellectual ability. Interestingly, males were more likely than females to show brain activation patterns in line with the neural efficiency hypothesis. Moreover, the findings in the female sample even point to the opposite direction (i.e., more brain activation in brighter individuals). Similar evidence was reported by Grabner, Fink, Stipacek, Neuper, and Neubauer (2004) who analyzed brain activation during performance of different working memory tasks. Again, neural efficiency was more strongly related to fluid (compared to crystallized) intelligence and males were more likely to display the negative relationship between intelligence and brain activation during working memory processing while in females positive correlations were found."

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