The left frontal lobe is critical for the AH4 fluid intelligence test

Joseph Mole, Jennifer Foley, Tim Shallice and Lisa Cipolotti

Intelligence, 2021, vol. 87, issue C

Abstract: The frontal lobes are thought to make a fundamental contribution to fluid intelligence. However, evidence that fluid intelligence is impaired following focal frontal lobe lesions is surprisingly sparse and based on non-verbal tests of fluid intelligence. We investigated performance on Part 1 of the Alice Heim 4 (AH4–1), a verbal test of fluid intelligence, in a sample of 35 patients with focal, unilateral, left or right, frontal brain tumours and 54 healthy controls. We analysed the following variables: overall number of correct AH4–1 answers, overall AH4–1 accuracy and accuracy on four selected categories of AH4–1 questions that assess abilities previously linked to the frontal lobes, namely: synonyms, verbal analogies, numerical series and multistage calculations. We found several significant frontal effects. Thus, in comparison to healthy controls, frontal patients had a significantly lower overall number of AH4–1 answers, had significantly lower overall AH4–1 accuracy and had significantly poorer performance on verbal analogies and multistage calculations. We also found several significant lateralised left frontal effects. Thus, in comparison to healthy controls, left, but not right, frontal patents had significantly lower overall AH4–1 accuracy and poorer performance on synonyms, numerical series and multistage calculation questions. This suggests that the left frontal lobe plays a critical role in AH4–1 performance. Moreover, left frontal patients had significantly lower overall AH4–1 accuracy and poorer performance on multistage calculations than right frontal patients. These results suggest that a left lateralised frontal network is critically involved in some aspects of fluid intelligence and, in particular, multistage calculations.

Keywords: Fluid intelligence; Frontal lobes; Left frontal lobe; AH4; Focal lesions (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2021
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0160289621000489
Full text for ScienceDirect subscribers only

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:eee:intell:v:87:y:2021:i:c:s0160289621000489

DOI: 10.1016/j.intell.2021.101564

Access Statistics for this article

Intelligence is currently edited by R.J. Haier

More articles in Intelligence from Elsevier
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Catherine Liu ().