Intelligence and cognitive flexibility: fluid intelligence correlates with feature "unbinding" across perception and action

Abstract

People integrate the features of perceived events and of action plans, as well as of episodic stimulus-response relations, into event files. We investigated whether the management of event files, and particularly the speed of updating the binding between the task-relevant stimulus feature and the response, correlates with fluid intelligence. Indeed, the performance of participants scoring high on Raven's Standard Progressive Matrices test was less impaired by a mismatch between the stimulus-response relation in the current and the previous trial. This result suggests that high intelligence is accompanied by a higher degree of flexibility in handling event files--that is, by higher efficiency in updating episodic representations.