Intelligence and neural efficiency: Further evidence of the influence of task content and sex on the brain–IQ relationship

In the field of physiological study of human intelligence, strong evidence of a more efficient operation (i.e., less activation) of the brain in brighter individuals (the neural efficiency hypothesis) can be found. Most studies in this field have used single, homogeneous tasks and have not examined sex differences. In analyzing the extent of Event-related Desynchronization (ERD) in the EEG during the performance of a verbal and a visuo-spatial task, we recently found that males and females display neural efficiency primarily in the domain where they usually perform better (i.e., verbal in females and spatial in males; cf. A.C. Neubauer, A. Fink, D.G. Schrausser, Intelligence and neural efficiency: the influence of task content and sex on brain–IQ relationship. Intelligence, 30 (2002) 515–536). However, this interpretation was complicated by differences in the complexity of the two tasks. By using a verbal (semantic) and a spatial (rotation) task of comparable complexity in this research, we sought to replicate and extend our earlier findings by additionally considering the individual differences in intelligence structure and the topographical distribution over the cortex. Findings were similar to the previous study: Females (n = 35) display neural efficiency (i.e., less brain activation in brighter individuals) primarily during the verbal task, males (n = 31) in the spatial task. However, the strength of this brain activation–IQ relationship varies with the intelligence factor: In males, the highest correlations were observed for spatial IQ, in females for verbal IQ. Furthermore, the sexes displayed topographical differences of neural efficiency patterns.