Article Review
The article I chose for this review is titled “Testing the Link between Visual Suppression and Intelligence” (Arranz-Paraíso & Serrano-Pedraza, 2018). The process of selecting this article began with an online search in the EBSCO databases. I narrowed the search to the subject of research interest: intelligence testing. The Boolean method enabled me to limit my search to peer-reviewed articles that were published within the last three years. In this way, I was able to pick a reliable publication containing recent empirical evidence from the study in the field of psychology.
Theoretical Background
The research in the article was grounded on the theory of multiple intelligences. This theoretical framework was developed by Howard Gardner to categorize people’s skills and talents in relation to their intellectual abilities (Tai, 2014). Visual-spatial intelligence is the specific concept of Gardner’s theory that formed the basis of the study in the article. The reason is that because Arranz-Paraíso and Serrano-Pedraza (2018) sought to measure the correlation between people’s visual inhibitory mechanisms and intelligence. In the introductory part of the article, the authors presented a review of studies on the link between intelligence and people’s ability to discriminate visual and spatial stimuli.
Research Design and Focus
The investigators used the experimental research design to conduct psychophysical tests related to motion discrimination and intelligence. Levine and Parkinson (2014) demonstrate that experimental design enables scholars to control research variables. Arranz-Paraíso and Serrano-Pedraza (2018) controlled the variables of their investigation by ensuring that participants with visual impairment were excluded from the experiment. Therefore, the experimental design allowed the researchers to focus on participants with normal visual acuity to guarantee accurate results. The investigators also excluded participants with depression because this condition affects people’s surround suppression (Arranz-Paraíso & Serrano-Pedraza, 2018).
Conclusions of the Research
Findings from the experiment led to the conclusion that individuals with a higher IQ are able to determine the right direction of motion when presented with small stimuli in shorter durations (Arranz-Paraíso & Serrano-Pedraza, 2018). The researchers also concluded that larger motion stimuli are discriminated by people with a higher IQ when viewed for longer durations (Arranz-Paraíso & Serrano-Pedraza, 2018). The conclusions of the authors are consistent with similar experiments which indicated that there is a relationship between intelligence and motion surround suppression (Melnick, Harrison, Park, Bennetto, & Tadin, 2013).
Analysis
The research data reported in the article is credible because the investigators applied standardized methods in their study. For example, the scholars used Reynolds Intellectual Assessment Scales to obtain accurate measures of both non-verbal and verbal intelligence of participants (Arranz-Paraíso & Serrano-Pedraza, 2018). Moreover, they applied the Bayesian adaptive psychometric method to do the motion discrimination experiment. The scholars aligned their study with the ethical standards for conducting experiments. Markedly, the ethics committee of the Complutense University of Madrid approved the experimental procedures of the research. However, the scholars were unable to establish the relationship between intelligence and the participants’ contrast surround suppression. They attributed this limitation to methodological constraints. The article was helpful as it enabled me to gain new insights into the concept of visual-spatial intelligence. I intend to use the obtained information to form the basis of my research on the correlation between visual-spatial intelligence and learning