A team led by University College London, UK, has mapped a brain region with the ability to solve problems without prior experience (fluid intelligence). The research results were recently published in the journal Brain. Fluid intelligence can be said to be the decisive feature of human cognition. It predicts educational and professional success, social mobility, health and longevity. It is also related to many cognitive abilities, such as memory. Fluid intelligence is considered to be a key feature of "active thinking", which is a complex psychological process involving abstraction, judgment, attention, strategy generation and inhibition. These skills can be used in daily activities. Although fluid intelligence plays a central role in human behavior, there are still disputes about whether it is a single cognitive ability or a group of cognitive abilities, and the nature of its relationship with the brain. In order to determine which parts of the brain are necessary for a certain ability, researchers must study patients with missing or damaged parts. Because of the challenge of identifying and testing patients with focal brain injury, this "damage defect mapping" study is difficult to conduct. Therefore, previous studies mainly used functional imaging technology, which may be misleading. Researchers from the Institute of Neurology, University College London, UK, investigated 227 patients with brain tumors or stroke in specific parts of the brain, and used the most complete fluid intelligence test program, the Raven's Inference Test (APM). This test includes multiple choice visual mode questions with increasing difficulty. Each question presents an incomplete geometric pattern, and the missing part needs to be selected from a set of multiple possible options. Then, the researchers introduced a novel "damage defect mapping" method to solve the complex anatomical patterns of common brain injury forms such as stroke. They regard the relationship between brain regions as a mathematical network, and its connection describes the tendency of regions to be affected together due to the disease process or the mapping of common cognitive ability. This allows researchers to separate the brain map of cognitive ability from the injury pattern, thus mapping different parts of the brain, and depending on the injury, determine which patients perform worse in fluid intelligence tasks. The researchers found that the manifestation of fluid intelligence impairment was mainly limited to the right frontal lobe injury, rather than distributed in a wide area of the brain. In addition to brain tumors and strokes, this injury is also common in patients with a range of other neurological diseases, including traumatic brain injury and dementia. This result shows for the first time that the right frontal lobe region of the brain is critical to the advanced functions involved in fluid intelligence, such as problem solving and reasoning. This supports the use of APM in a clinical setting as a means of assessing fluid intelligence and identifying right frontal lobe dysfunction. The method of combining the new disease defect mapping with a large number of patients' APM performance data provides important information on the neural basis of fluid intelligence. More attention to the study of pathological changes is also essential to reveal the relationship between brain and cognition. (Reporter Zhang Mengran) (News Agency)