Visual-spatial abilities are usually neglected in academic settings, even though several studies have shown that their predictive power in science, technology, engineering, and mathematics domains exceeds that of math and verbal ability. This neglect means that many spatially talented youths are not identified and nurtured, at a great cost to society. In the present work, we aim to identify behavioral and electrophysiological markers associated with visual spatial-ability in intellectually gifted adolescents (N = 15) compared to agematched controls (N = 15). The participants performed a classic three-dimensional mental rotation task developed by Shepard and Metzler (1971) [33] while event-related potentials were measured in both frontal and parietal regions of interest. While response time was similar in the two groups, gifted subjects performed the test with greater accuracy. There was no indication of interhemispheric asymmetry of ERPs over parietal regions in both groups, although interhemispheric differences were observed in the frontal lobes. Moreover, intelligence quotient and working memory measures predicted variance in ERP's amplitude in the right parietal and frontal hemispheres. We conclude that while gifted adolescents do not display a different pattern of electroencephalographic activity over the parietal cortex while performing the mental rotation task, their performance is correlated with the amplitude of ERPs in the frontal cortex during the execution of this task.

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IntroductionThe search for a cortical signature of intelligent behavior has been a longtime motivation in Neuroscience. One noticeable characteristic of intelligence is its association with visuospatial skills. This has led to a steady focus on the functional and structural characteristics of the frontoparietal network (FPN) of areas involved with higher cognition and spatial behavior in humans, including the question of whether intelligence is correlated with larger or smaller activity in this important cortical circuit. This question has broad significance, including speculations about the evolution of human cognition. One way to indirectly measure cortical activity with millisecond precision is to evaluate the event-related spectral perturbation (ERSP) of alpha power (alpha ERSP) during cognitive tasks. Mental rotation, or the ability to transform a mental representation of an object to accurately predict how the object would look from a different angle, is an important feature of everyday activities and has been shown in previous work by our group to be positively correlated with intelligence. In the present work, we evaluate whether alpha ERSP recorded over the parietal, frontal, temporal, and occipital regions of adolescents performing easy and difficult trials of the Shepard–Metzler’s mental rotation task, correlates or are predicted by intelligence measures of the Weschler’s intelligence scale.MethodsWe used a database obtained from a previous study of intellectually gifted (N = 15) and average intelligence (N = 15) adolescents.ResultsOur findings suggest that in challenging task conditions, there is a notable difference in the prominence of alpha event-related spectral perturbation (ERSP) activity between various cortical regions. Specifically, we found that alpha ERSP in the parietal region was less prominent relative to those in the frontal, temporal and occipital regions. Working memory scores predict alpha ERSP values in the frontal and parietal regions. In the frontal cortex, alpha ERSP of difficult trials was negatively correlated with working memory scores.DiscussionThus, our results suggest that even though the FPN is task-relevant during mental rotation tasks, only the frontal alpha ERSP is correlated with working memory score in mental rotation tasks.

This study investigated the performance of children from the Brazilian Northeast region, from 7 to 10 years in phonemic and semantic verbal fluency tasks. The participants were 102 subjects (62 girls and 40 boys) who performed three phonemic and three semantic fluency tasks. The results were submitted to correlational and variance analysis to investigate the influence of the variables age and gender on the subjects performance. There was no effect of gender on the results. Significant contrasts between age groups were found, and better performance was observed on phonemic tasks. Also, the performance in this task changed along development, in contrast to what happened with the semantic fluency. The findings seem to be in accordance to neurodevelopmental aspects, taken into account that explicit memory systems show more precocious maturational course, with earlier consolidation, in comparison to the executive functions and frontal lobes, which go on developing until adult ages.

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