Think You're Pretty Smart? You May Actually Stink at Visual Skills, Crucial in Today's Digital World
For all of you out there who got straight A's and scored high on your SAT (if you can remember back that far!), it doesn't necessarily mean that you 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. Your visual intelligence is not the same as your IQ, according to newswise.com. That is the implication of a new study which shows 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’ general intelligence, or IQ. “People may think they can tell how good they are at identifying objects visually,” says Isabel Gauthier, David K. Wilson Professor of Psychology at Vanderbilt University, who headed the study. “But it turns out that they are not very good at evaluating their own skills relative to others.” In the past, research in visual objec...