And you thought visual intelligence is the same as intelligence quotient (IQ)?
According to a recent study, 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.
The Vanderbilt University research showed for the first time that there is a broad range of differences in people's visual ability and that these variations are not associated with individuals' IQ.
Lead researcher Isabel Gauthier and her colleagues developed a new test, which they call the Novel Object Memory Test (NOMT), to measure people's ability to identify unfamiliar objects.
Gauthier first wanted to gauge public opinions about visual skills. She did so by surveying 100 laypeople using the Amazon Mechanical Turk crowdsourcing service. She found that respondents generally consider visual tasks as fairly different from other tasks related to general intelligence. She also discovered that they feel there is less variation in people's visual skills than there is in non-visual skills such as verbal and math ability.
The main problem that Gauthier and colleagues had to address in assessing individuals' innate visual recognition ability was familiarity. The more time a person spends learning about specific types of objects, such as faces, cars or birds, the better they get at identifying them. As a result, performance on visual recognition tests that use images of common objects are a complex mixture of people's visual ability and their experience with these objects. Importantly, they have proven to be a poor predictor of how well someone can learn to identify objects in a new domain.
Gauthier addressed this problem by using novel computer-generated creatures called greebles, sheinbugs and ziggerins to study visual recognition. The basic test consists of studying six target creatures, followed by a number of test trials displaying creatures in sets of three. Each set contains a creature from the target group along with two unfamiliar creatures, and the participant is asked to pick out the creature that is familiar.
Analyzing the results from more than 2000 subjects, Gauthier and colleagues discovered that the ability to recognize one kind of creature was well predicted by how well subjects could recognize the other kind, although these objects were visually quite different. This confirmed the new test can predict the ability to learn new categories.
The psychologists also used performance on several IQ-related tests and determined that the visual ability measured on the NOMT is distinct from and independent of general intelligence.
"A lot of jobs and hobbies depend on visual skills," Gauthier said. "Because they are independent of general intelligence, the next step is to explore how we can use these tests in real-world applications where performance could not be well predicted before."
The study appears in the journal, Current Directions in Psychological Science.
Disclaimer: No Business Standard Journalist was involved in creation of this content
