Spatio-Temporal Brain Dynamic Differences in Fluid Intelligence

Human fluid intelligence is closely linked to the sequential solving of complex problems. It has been associated with a distributed cognitive control or multiple-demand (MD) network, comprising regions of lateral frontal, insular, dorsomedial frontal, and parietal cortex. Previous neuroimaging research suggests that the MD network may orchestrate the allocation of attentional resources to individual parts of a complex task: in a complex target detection task with multiple independent rules, applied one at a time, reduced response to rule-critical events across the MD network in lower fluid intelligence was observed. This was in particular the case with increasing task complexity (i.e., larger sets of rules), and was accompanied by impairment in performance. Here, we examined the early spatiotemporal neural dynamics of this process in electroencephalography (EEG) source analyses using a similar task paradigm. Levels of fluid intelligence specifically predicted early neural responses in a left inferiorparietal MD region around 200-300 ms post stimulus onset. Evoked source amplitudes in left parietal cortex within this early time window also correlated with behavioural performance measures. Like in previous research, we observed impaired performance in lower fluid intelligence with increasing number of task rules. This links fluid intelligence to a process of attentional focus on those parts of a task that are most critical for the current behaviour. Within the MD system, our time re-resolved measures suggest that the left parietal cortex specifically impacts on early processes of attentional focus on task critical features. This is novel evidence on the neurocognitive correlates of fluid intelligence suggesting that individual differences are critically linked to an early process of attentional focus on task-relevant information, which is supported by left parietal MD regions.