A study from the Vanderbilt University proposes that there is something like visual intelligence, which does not correlate with general intelligence, showing for the first time the broad range of differences in visual ability are not related with general intelligence.
The researchers aimed to find out how much visual abilities vary among individuals, by developing a test called the Novel Object Memory Test or NOMT, which measures the ability of test-subjects to identify unfamiliar objects like the ones above. First, the team surveyed 100 participants by using the Amazon Mechanical Turk crowdsourcing service; they found that responders generally consider visual tasks as different from other tasks related to general intelligence, as well as that they feel there was less variation in visual skills than in non-visual ones, like math or verbal ability.
During the first part of the test it showed that participants were more likely to identify and object as something specific, if they learned a lot about special types of objects beforehand; to avoid that sense of familiarity, they used novel computer-generated creatures. Then, the participants were to take IQ-related tasks, in order to determine that general intelligence is not linked to NOMT-skills.
The study concluded that not only are these two types of intelligence unrelated, but also that people overestimate their visual abilities.
