Decision Making and Intelligence

If you are smart, do you make good decisions? Most people believe the answer to this question is yes, but a growing body of literature suggests that intelligence and decision-making are different skills and just because you are intelligent does not necessarily imply you also make good decisions. To test this hypothesis, my research seeks to determine the brain regions which work in tandem and which work separately in these cognitive processes by examining both structural and functional connectivity of the brain. Decision-making was assessed through the Adult Decision Making Competence battery (A-DMC), which comprised six types of decision making. Both fluid and crystallized intelligence were assessed through three different tests. A graph theory metric, small world propensity, was used to characterize both functional and structural images of the brain. We implemented principal component analysis in R to identify factors of intelligence and decision making. We then correlated those factors with the small world propensity measure of structural and functional connectivity. Preliminary results provide evidence for an overlap between the brain regions involved in decision making and intelligence, but there is also evidence for brain regions which are distinct in these cognitive processes.