The Neuroscience of Intelligence by Richard J. Haier

Author:Richard J. Haier [Haier, Richard J.]
Language: eng
Format: epub, pdf
ISBN: 9781107089778
Amazon: 110746143X
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Published: 2016-12-28T08:00:00+00:00

4.4 Are “Intelligence” and “Reasoning” Synonyms?

This may seem an odd question, but there is an anomaly in the research literature that deserves some consideration at this point. There is a specialization within the field of cognitive psychology that studies reasoning. Relational reasoning, inductive reasoning, deductive reasoning, analogical reasoning, and other kinds of reasoning are subjects in a variety of studies, including ones that use neuroimaging to identify brain characteristics and networks related to reasoning. The anomaly is that more than a few of these cognitive neuroscience studies of reasoning do not use the word intelligence and they often fail to cite relevant neuroimaging studies of intelligence. This is problematic because tests of reasoning are highly correlated to the g-factor (Jensen, 1998). In fact, analogy tests have some of the highest g-loadings of any mental ability tests. Obviously, this means that findings from intelligence studies are quite relevant to reasoning research and vice versa.

In my view, the artificial preference of “reasoning” over “intelligence” made by some researchers has its origins in a long-held view within cognitive psychology that the word “intelligence” is too loaded with controversy and therefore must be avoided completely. It is not unusual to find that books in the field of cognitive psychology and cognitive neuroscience do not include “intelligence” in the index. Language counts. No one is fooled by substituting “reasoning” for “intelligence,” although some granting agencies may think so.

Generally, neuroimaging studies of reasoning show network results consistent with intelligence studies, although reasoning studies tend to differentiate more components of information processing and accompanying subnetworks. This is an important difference and a positive one for identifying the salient brain components for different cognitive processes involved in intelligence factors. An excellent example is a sophisticated fMRI study that compared groups of high school students (N = 40) defined by high and average fluid intelligence scores while they performed problems of different difficulty that required geometric analogical reasoning (Preusse et al., 2011). Hypotheses were based in part on the PFIT and on brain efficiency. The authors concluded that the high-IQ students “… display stronger task-related recruitment of parietal brain regions on the one hand and a negative brain activation–intelligence relationship in frontal brain regions on the other hand … We showed that the relationship between brain activation and fluid intelligence is not mono-directional, but rather, frontal and parietal brain regions are differentially modulated by fluid intelligence when participants carry out the geometric analogical reasoning task.” The integration of reasoning and intelligence findings in this work demonstrates the richness of interpretation possibilities and helps advance the field.

Two other interesting and well-done fMRI papers investigated analogical reasoning although neither one mentioned intelligence. They appeared in a special section on “The neural substrate of analogical reasoning and metaphor comprehension” in the Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory, and Cognition (only one of the other six papers in this section mentioned intelligence). The first example used an analogy generation task in a sample of 23 male college students and found corresponding brain activity in a region of the left frontal-polar cortex, as hypothesized (Green et al.

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