What your eyes say about your intelligence

People with larger pupils have higher intelligence, and the difference is visible to the naked eye. Larger pupils are associated with both higher fluid intelligence * and larger memory capacity, scientists say.

As is known, the pupil expands in response to changes in light. Psychologists have found that it also responds to brain activity: the faster the brain works, the more pupils grow.

As early as the 1960s, psychologists have found that the size of the pupil reflects more than the amount of light coming into the eyes, writes the authors of the study, published in the scientific journal Cognitive Psychology . It reveals a lot about internal mental processes. For example, when saving a task, pupil size accurately tracks changes in memory load. They expand with each new element stored in the memory and shrink after each element is subsequently recalled.

In the study, the researchers measured the basal size of the pupil of 40 people. As an IQ, half were in the upper quarter of the total distribution and the other half in the lower quarter. The pupil's initial size is measured when a person is sitting quietly without doing anything special.

"We have shown that there are large differences in pupil size, even visible to the naked eye, between people with high and low cognitive abilities engaged in a cognitive task, and these differences can not be explained by the differences in mental effort," the authors write.

• Fluid intelligence is the ability to solve problems, to think logically and to identify patterns in a particular set of information. It differs from the so-called "Crystallized intelligence", which is related to the use of already acquired skills, knowledge and experience. Many scientists question the concept of "basic" intelligence and talk about many different kinds of intelligence. Classical intelligence tests reflect only a minority of them (logical, mathematical, linguistic), and can hardly be considered an objective criterion. (Ed.)

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