News Release

Brain scans may help guide career choice

Peer-Reviewed Publication

BMC (BioMed Central)

General aptitude tests and specific mental ability tests are important tools for vocational guidance. Researchers are now asking whether performance on such tests is based on differences in brain structure, and if so, can brain scans be helpful in choosing a career? In a first step, researchers writing in the open access journal BMC Research Notes have investigated how well eight tests used in vocational guidance correlate to gray matter in areas throughout the brain.

Richard Haier, from the University of California, USA, worked with a team of researchers to investigate the neurological basis for performance on each of the tests. He said, "Individual differences in cognitive abilities provide information that is valuable for vocational guidance. There is some debate, however, as to whether results on individual tests of specific abilities may be more helpful than results on tests of broader factors, like general intelligence. We compared brain networks identified using scores on broad cognitive ability tests to those identified by using specific cognitive tests to determine whether these relatively broad and narrow approaches yield similar results".

Using MRI, the researchers correlated gray matter with independent ability factors (general intelligence, speed of reasoning, numerical, spatial, memory) and with individual test scores from a battery of cognitive tests completed by 40 individuals seeking vocational guidance. They found that, in general, the grey matter correlates for the broad and narrow test types were different. Speaking about the results Haier said, "A person's pattern of cognitive strengths and weaknesses is related to their brain structure, so there is a possibility that brain scans could provide unique information that would be helpful for vocational choice. Our current results form a basis to investigate this further."

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Notes to Editors

1. Gray matter correlates of cognitive ability tests used for vocational guidance
Richard J Haier, David H Schroeder, Cheuk Tang, Kevin Head and Roberto Colom
BMC Research Notes (in press)

During embargo, article available here: http://www.biomedcentral.com/imedia/1979061341366284_article.pdf?random=583202

After the embargo, article available at the journal website: http://www.biomedcentral.com/bmcresnotes/

Please name the journal in any story you write. If you are writing for the web, please link to the article. All articles are available free of charge, according to BioMed Central's open access policy.

Article citation and URL available on request at press@biomedcentral.com on the day of publication.

2. BMC Research Notes is an open access journal publishing scientifically sound research across all fields of biology and medicine, enabling authors to publish updates to previous research, software tools and databases, data sets, small-scale clinical studies, and reports of confirmatory or 'negative' results. Additionally the journal welcomes descriptions of incremental improvements to methods as well as short correspondence items and hypotheses.

3. The participants in this study completed testing at the Johnson O'Connor Research Foundation, a non-profit organization that is dedicated to research and testing human abilities. The Foundation funded this project and currently provides vocational-guidance testing to approximately 5,000 individuals per year in 11 cities across the United States. Their latest research efforts include the development of new aptitude tests, relating existing tests to vocational outcomes, and examining brain correlates of abilities via neuro-imaging. The MRI scanning was conducted at Mt. Sinai Medical Center in New York City under the supervision of Dr. Cheuk Tang.

4. BioMed Central (http://www.biomedcentral.com/) is an STM (Science, Technology and Medicine) publisher which has pioneered the open access publishing model. All peer-reviewed research articles published by BioMed Central are made immediately and freely accessible online, and are licensed to allow redistribution and reuse. BioMed Central is part of Springer Science+Business Media, a leading global publisher in the STM sector.


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