If everything fades into the background, you may have a high IQ
The absent-minded professor is a classic image: someone who's lost in deep thoughts all the time but pays very little attention to the what's going on right in front of them. Well, there may be a little something to that cliché (if only just a little) if a study published this week in Current Biology is to be believed. The study showed that IQ scores, an imperfect measure of people's general mental faculties, correlated with their tendency to ignore an image that may be mistaken for background visual noise.
The results are a bit easier to understand than the interpretation, so we'll start with those. The visual tests all involved a pattern of dark bars on a light background that would move to either the left or right. The study participants were asked to determine which way they were moving, and the researchers timed how long it took. During the same experiments, the participants were given a standard IQ test.
The key feature of the work was that the size of the image—the degree to which the grey bars filled the screen—varied during the tests. In some cases, the bars filled most of the screen, while in others they covered only a small portion directly in the middle.
