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•Functional brain connectivity (FC) patterns vary with changes in the environment.•Adult FC variability is linked to age-specific network communication profiles.•Across adulthood, the younger network interaction profile predicts higher fluid IQ.•Yoked FC-concrete environmental changes predict poorer fluid IQ and anxiety.•Brain areas linked to episodic memory underpin FC changes at multiple timescales. BOLD fMRI studies have provided compelling evidence that the human brain demonstrates substantial moment-to-moment fluctuations in both activity and functional connectivity (FC) patterns. While the role of brain signal variability in fostering cognitive adaptation to ongoing environmental demands is well-documented, the relevance of moment-to-moment changes in FC patterns is still debated. Here, we adopt a graph theoretical approach in order to shed light on the cognitive-affective implications of FC variability and associated profiles of functional network communication in adulthood. Our goal is to identify brain communication pathways underlying FC reconfiguration at multiple timescales, thereby improving understanding of how faster perceptually bound versus slower conceptual processes shape neural tuning to the dynamics of the external world and, thus, indirectly, mold affective and cognitive responding to the environment. To this end, we used neuroimaging and behavioural data collected during movie watching by the Cambridge Center for Ageing and Neuroscience (N = 642, 326 women) and the Human Connectome Project (N = 176, 106 women). FC variability evoked by changes to both the concrete perceptual and the more abstract conceptual representation of an ongoing situation increased from young to older adulthood. However, coupling between variability in FC patterns and concrete environmental features was stronger at younger ages. FC variability (both moment-to-moment/concrete featural and abstract conceptual boundary-evoked) was associated with age-distinct profiles of network communication, specifically, greater functional integration of the default mode network in older adulthood, but greater informational flow across neural networks implicated in environmentally driven attention and control (cingulo-opercular, salience, ventral attention) in younger adulthood. Whole-brain communication pathways anchored in default mode regions relevant to episodic and semantic context creation (i.e., angular and middle temporal gyri) supported FC reconfiguration in response to changes in the conceptual representation of an ongoing situation (i.e., narrative event boundaries), as well as stronger coupling between moment-to-moment fluctuations in FC and concrete environmental features. Fluid intelligence/abstract reasoning was directly linked to levels of brain-environment alignment, but only indirectly associated with levels of FC variability. Specifically, stronger coupling between moment-to-moment FC variability and concrete environmental features predicted poorer fluid intelligence and greater affectively driven environmental vigilance. Complementarily, across the adult lifespan, higher fluid (but not crystallised) intelligence was related to stronger expression of the network communication profile underlying momentary and event boundary-based FC variability during youth. Our results indicate that the adaptiveness of dynamic FC reconfiguration during naturalistic information processing changes across the lifespan due to the associated network communication profiles. Moreover, our findings on brain-environment alignment complement the existing literature on the beneficial consequences of modulating brain signal variability in response to environmental complexity. Specifically, they imply that coupling between moment-to-moment FC variability and concrete environmental features may index a bias towards perceptually-bound, rather than conceptual processing, which hinders affective functioning and strategic cognitive engagement with the external environment.

Eye movement studies are subject of interest in human cognition. Cortical activity and cognitive load impress eye movement influentially. Here, we investigated whether fluid intelligence (FI) has any effect on eye movement pattern in a comparative visual search (CVS) task. FI of individuals was measured using the Cattell test, and participants were divided into three groups: low FI, middle FI, and high FI. Eye movements of individuals were then recorded during the CVS task. Eye movement patterns were extracted and compared statistically among the three groups. Our experiment demonstrated that eye movement patterns were significantly different among the three groups. Pearson correlation coefficients between FI and eye movement parameters were also calculated to assess which of the eye movement parameters were most affected by FI. Our findings illustrate that saccade peak velocity had the greatest positive correlation with FI score and the ratio of total fixation duration to total saccade duration had the greatest negative correlation with FI. Next, we extracted 24 features from eye movement patterns and designed: (1) a classifier to categorize individuals and (2) a regression analysis to predict the FI score of individuals. In the best case examined, the classifier categorized subjects with 68.3% accuracy, and the regression predicted FI of individuals with a 0.54 correlation between observed FI and predicted FI. In our investigation, the results have emphasized that imposed loads on low FI individuals is greater than that of high FI individuals in the cognitive load tasks.

Autistics are presumed to be characterized by cognitive impairment, and their cognitive strengths (e.g., in Block Design performance) are frequently interpreted as low-level by-products of high-level deficits, not as direct manifestations of intelligence. Recent attempts to identify the neuroanatomical and neurofunctional signature of autism have been positioned on this universal, but untested, assumption. We therefore assessed a broad sample of 38 autistic children on the preeminent test of fluid intelligence, Raven's Progressive Matrices. Their scores were, on average, 30 percentile points, and in some cases more than 70 percentile points, higher than their scores on the Wechsler scales of intelligence. Typically developing control children showed no such discrepancy, and a similar contrast was observed when a sample of autistic adults was compared with a sample of nonautistic adults. We conclude that intelligence has been underestimated in autistics.

The present study provides a new account of how fluid intelligence influences academic performance. In this account a complex learning component of fluid intelligence tests is proposed to play a major role in predicting academic performance. A sample of 2, 277 secondary school students completed two reasoning tests that were assumed to represent fluid intelligence and standardized math and verbal tests assessing academic performance. The fluid intelligence data were decomposed into a learning component that was associated with the position effect of intelligence items and a constant component that was independent of the position effect. Results showed that the learning component contributed significantly more to the prediction of math and verbal performance than the constant component. The link from the learning component to math performance was especially strong. These results indicated that fluid intelligence, which has so far been considered as homogeneous, could be decomposed in such a way that the resulting components showed different properties and contributed differently to the prediction of academic performance. Furthermore, the results were in line with the expectation that learning was a predictor of performance in school.

Is it possible to induce a mind-set that will affect relational thinking in a subsequent reasoning task involving unrelated materials? We investigated whether evaluating the validity of verbal analogies (Experiment 1a) or generating solutions for them (Experiment 1b) could induce a relational mind-set that would transfer to an unrelated picture-mapping task. The verbal analogies were based on either near or far semantic relations. We found that generating (but not evaluating) solutions for semantically distant analogies increased the proportion of relational mappings on the transfer task, even after we controlled for fluid intelligence and response time. Solving near analogies did not produce transfer. Generation of solutions to far analogies appears to provide a potent method for triggering a mind-set that can enhance relational thinking in a different task.

The poor are universally stigmatized. The stigma of poverty includes being perceived as incompetent and feeling shunned and disrespected. It can lead to cognitive distancing, diminish cognitive performance, and cause the poor to forego beneficial programs. In the present research, we examined how self-affirmation can mitigate the stigma of poverty through randomized field experiments involving low-income individuals at an inner-city soup kitchen. Because of low literacy levels, we used an oral rather than written affirmation procedure, in which participants verbally described a personal experience that made them feel successful or proud. Compared with nonaffirmed participants, affirmed individuals exhibited better executive control, higher fluid intelligence, and a greater willingness to avail themselves of benefits programs. The effects were not driven by elevated positive mood, and the same intervention did not affect the performance of wealthy participants. The findings suggest that self-affirmation can improve the cognitive performance and decisions of the poor, and it may have important policy implications.

In this follow-up to my 2002 article on working memory capacity, fluid intelligence, and executive attention in Current Directions in Psychological Science, I review even more evidence supporting the idea that the ability to control one’s attention (i.e., executive attention) is important to working memory and fluid intelligence. I now argue that working memory tasks reflect primarily the maintenance of information, whereas fluid intelligence tests reflect primarily the ability to disengage from recently attended and no longer useful information. I also point out some conclusions in the 2002 article that now appear to be wrong.

Analogical reasoning is a core cognitive skill that distinguishes humans from all other species and contributes to general fluid intelligence, creativity, and adaptive learning capacities. Yet its origins are not well understood. In the study reported here, we analyzed large-scale longitudinal data from the Study of Early Child Care and Youth Development to test predictors of growth in analogical-reasoning skill from third grade to adolescence. Our results suggest an integrative resolution to the theoretical debate regarding contributory factors arising from smaller-scale, cross-sectional experiments on analogy development. Children with greater executive-function skills (both composite and inhibitory control) and vocabulary knowledge in early elementary school displayed higher scores on a verbal analogies task at age 15 years, even after adjusting for key covariates. We posit that knowledge is a prerequisite to analogy performance, but strong executive-functioning resources during early childhood are related to long-term gains in fundamental reasoning skills.

Two-component theories of intellectual development over the life span postulate that fluid abilities develop earlier during child development and decline earlier during aging than crystallized abilities do, and that fluid abilities support or constrain the acquisition and expression of crystallized abilities. Thus, maturation and senescence compress the structure of intelligence by imposing age-specific constraints upon its constituent processes. Hence, the couplings among different intellectual abilities and cognitive processes are expected to be strong in childhood and old age. Findings from a population-based study of 291 individuals aged 6 to 89 years support these predictions. Furthermore, processing robustness, a frequently overlooked aspect of processing, predicted fluid intelligence beyond processing speed in old age but not in childhood, suggesting that the causes of more compressed functional organization of intelligence differ between maturation and senescence. Research on developmental changes in functional brain circuitry may profit from explicitly recognizing transformations in the organization of intellectual abilities and their underlying cognitive processes across the life span.

Working memory capacity (WMC) has received attention across many areas of psychology, in part because of its relationship with intelligence. The mechanism underlying the relationship is unknown, but the nature of typical WMC tasks has led to two hypothesized mechanisms: secondary-memory processes (e.g., search and retrieval) and the maintenance of information in the face of distraction. In the present study, participants (N = 383) completed a battery of cognitive tasks assessing processing speed, primary memory, working memory, secondary memory, and fluid intelligence. Secondary memory was the strongest predictor of fluid intelligence and added unique predictive value in models that accounted for working memory. In contrast, after accounting for the variance in fluid intelligence associated with the secondary-memory construct, the working memory construct did not significantly predict variability in fluid intelligence. Therefore, the secondary-memory requirements shared by many memory tasks may be responsible for the relationship between WMC and fluid intelligence, making the relationship less unique than is often supposed.