Neural efficiency as a function of task demands.
The neural efficiency hypothesis describes the phenomenon that brighter individuals show lower brain activation than less bright individuals when working on the same cognitive tasks. The present study investigated whether the brain activation-intelligence relationship still applies when more versus less intelligent individuals perform tasks with a comparable person-specific task difficulty. In an fMRI-study, 58 persons with lower (n= 28) or respectively higher (n= 30) intelligence worked on simple and difficult inductive reasoning tasks having the same person-specific task difficulty. Consequently, less bright individuals received sample-based easy and medium tasks, whereas bright subjects received sample-based medium and difficult tasks. This design also allowed a comparison of lower versus higher intelligent individuals when working on the same tasks (i.e. sample-based medium task difficulty). In line with expectations, differences in task performance and in brain activation were only found for the subset of tasks with the same sample-based task difficulty, but not when comparing tasks with the same person-specific task difficulty. These results suggest that neural efficiency reflects an (ability-dependent) adaption of brain activation to the respective task demands.
Department of Psychology, University of Graz, Austria.
Beate
B
Dunst
Department of Psychology, University of Graz, Austria.
Mathias
M
Benedek
Department of Psychology, University of Graz, Austria.
Emanuel
E
Jauk
Department of Psychology, University of Graz, Austria ; Department of Leadership and Entrepreneurship, University of Graz, Austria.
Sabine
S
Bergner
Department of Psychology, University of Graz, Austria.
Karl
K
Koschutnig
Department of Psychology, University of Graz, Austria.
Markus
M
Sommer
Department of Psychology, University of Graz, Austria.
Anja
A
Ischebeck
Department of Psychology, Ruprecht-Karls-University Heidelberg, Germany.
Birgit
B
Spinath
Department of Psychology, University of Graz, Austria.
Martin
M
Arendasy
Department of Psychology, Ludwig-Maximilians-University Munich, Germany.
Markus
M
Bühner
Department of Psychology, University of Graz, Austria.
Heribert
H
Freudenthaler
Department of Psychology, University of Graz, Austria.
Aljoscha C
AC
Neubauer
Intelligence; Neural efficiency; Tailored testing; Task difficulty; fMRI