Principal Investigator: John Jonides University of Michigan
Fluid intelligence (an important component of what is usually termed "IQ") is the ability to reason and to solve new problems independently of previously acquired knowledge, and so it is considered one of the most important factors in learning. Moreover, fluid intelligence is closely related to professional and educational success. There is considerable agreement that fluid intelligence is highly heritable, but this does not mean that it cannot be influenced by education and socialization. Recently, the research group of Dr. John Jonides at the University of Michigan published a widely acclaimed article in which they report evidence of transfer from training on a demanding working memory task to measures of fluid intelligence. Working memory is the system that is responsible for the short-term storage of information to be used in the service of higher-level cognitive processing. Individuals were trained on a working memory task that required simultaneously holding in mind spatial and verbal information that constantly had to be updated as the task continued. This working memory training effect is a surprising finding both because previous efforts to train IQ have thus far not been successful, and because it is all too rare to find transfer effects from any training task to another task that differs from the trained task in content. The transfer in question resulted even though the trained task was entirely different from the intelligence test itself. Furthermore, the results indicated that the amount of gain in IQ critically depended on the amount of training: the more training, the more improvement in fluid intelligence. The present NSF-funded project seeks to examine the brain basis of this training effect. It is based on the rationale that successful transfer from working memory to measures of intelligence must come about because there are brain mechanisms in common between the two. The project involves testing participants' fluid intelligence, training them for 5 weeks on a working memory task that has been shown to influence fluid intelligence, and then testing their fluid intelligence after training. Crucially, participants will be scanned using functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) while they take intelligence tests, early and late in training on working memory, and then again when they take intelligence tests after training. The data should yield important insights about the brain regions that underlie working memory and fluid intelligence and whether these regions overlap between the two sets of tasks as expected.
This research project is significant in several ways. First, understanding the relationship between working memory and fluid intelligence leads the way to developing training schemes to improve fluid intelligence. There can be little doubt that facilitating the intelligence of individuals can only yield benefits for society in its productivity and its intellectual approach to society's problems. Second, understanding the brain mechanisms that are shared in common between working memory and intelligence permits prediction about what cognitive skills will be lost after certain brain traumas and what remediations may be effective. Third, undergraduates, graduate students, and postdoctoral researchers who are engaged in the project will learn the fundamentals of scanning in the functional magnetic resonance imaging environment as well as experimental skills, thereby strengthening their scientific training.
