People with higher reasoning skills appear to be better at forming internal maps of how different objects are related in space, according to a study published in Cell Reports. The research provides evidence that a key feature of intelligence may stem from the way the brain encodes relationships between experiences, especially through a region called the hippocampus.
The findings point to a link between general cognitive ability and how well people integrate separate pieces of information into a structured whole. Rather than focusing on how smart individuals perform in specific tasks, the researchers examined how their brains encode the structure of experiences. The results suggest that intelligence may involve the ability to form a mental map of the world that helps guide flexible thinking and decision making.
The study was conducted by researchers Rebekka Tenderra and Stephanie Theves at the Max Planck Institute for Empirical Aesthetics and the Max Planck Institute for Human Cognitive and Brain Sciences in Germany. They were interested in exploring how intelligence, especially fluid intelligence, might be related to specific patterns of brain activity during learning.
Fluid intelligence refers to the capacity to solve new problems and recognize patterns, often measured by reasoning tests. It has long been considered one of the core components of general intelligence and is strongly associated with performance across a wide range of tasks. Although past studies have identified brain areas linked to intelligence, such as the frontal and parietal cortices, the specific neural processes that underlie it are less well understood.
The researchers hypothesized that one way people differ in intelligence may be through how well they organize information into relational structures. In other words, smarter individuals might be more likely to represent different pieces of information as part of a broader map, capturing how elements relate to each other in space or conceptually. Previous studies had suggested that the hippocampus, a part of the brain known for memory and spatial navigation, plays a role in creating these kinds of cognitive maps.
To test their hypothesis, the researchers used brain imaging to observe how participants learned the locations of various objects placed within a virtual arena. Participants saw six different objects, each assigned to a specific spot in a circular space. They practiced placing the objects in the correct locations and received feedback after each attempt.
As the learning progressed, participants became more accurate at remembering where each object belonged. After completing the task, they were asked to arrange the objects from a bird’s-eye view, demonstrating how well they had internalized the layout. Their answers closely matched the actual object positions, suggesting that most participants were able to form a fairly accurate mental map of the environment.
Meanwhile, the researchers used functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) to record activity in the hippocampus while participants viewed the objects. They looked for patterns indicating whether the brain represented the spatial relationships between the objects. Specifically, they examined whether neural activity patterns were more similar for objects that were closer together in the learned layout, and more different for objects that were farther apart.
The key finding was that individuals with higher fluid intelligence scores showed stronger signs of this “map-like” encoding in the right hippocampus. That is, their brain activity reflected a clearer sense of the distances between object locations. This connection between relational encoding and intelligence remained even after accounting for how well the participants performed on the memory tasks, suggesting that the brain patterns were not simply a reflection of who remembered more accurately.
Additional analyses showed that this brain-behavior link was consistent across various cognitive tasks, especially those that were more strongly related to fluid intelligence. The correlation was not driven by any single test but rather reflected a broad tendency among smarter individuals to organize their learning experiences in a more structured, map-like way.
When the researchers compared people with higher versus lower fluid intelligence scores, they found differences in how consistently the brain represented object relationships. Those in the lower intelligence group had neural representations that were less consistent with a two-dimensional map. In practical terms, this suggests they may have encoded some object pairs in ways that didn’t align well with an overall spatial layout, pointing to lapses in integrating relationships across the whole scene.
To further investigate this idea, the researchers asked participants to estimate distances between object pairs on a sliding scale. Again, the results showed that people with higher intelligence scores provided more geometrically consistent estimates, reinforcing the idea that they were better at integrating object relations into a cohesive map.
The researchers also tested whether the observed relationship between intelligence and brain activity was specific to relational encoding. They did this by including a separate memory task where participants simply had to recognize whether they had seen an object before. This task measured basic item memory, not how the objects related to each other.
While participants performed well overall, the strength of brain responses in the hippocampus during this task did not correlate with intelligence scores. This suggests that general reasoning ability is specifically tied to the ability to encode relationships, not just memory in general.
These results add to a growing body of work that views the hippocampus not only as a center for memory and spatial navigation but also as a hub for organizing information in ways that support flexible thinking. The ability to represent how different elements of an experience are related may provide a foundation for solving problems in new contexts or drawing inferences from limited data.
The researchers acknowledge that their study focused on a specific type of relational learning involving spatial arrangements. It remains to be seen whether the same principles apply to other kinds of abstract relationships, such as those involving concepts or rules. In addition, the study was conducted with a relatively homogenous group of healthy adults, which may limit how broadly the findings apply.
Since the research was cross-sectional, it cannot speak to causality. It’s unclear whether having a more structured way of encoding relationships contributes to higher intelligence or whether people with higher intelligence naturally develop better strategies for organizing information. Long-term studies could help clarify how these abilities develop over time and interact.
The researchers suggest that future studies could explore whether these relational encoding patterns show up in other brain regions involved in reasoning or generalization, such as the prefrontal cortex. There is some evidence that these areas also represent structured information, although it is not yet clear how their role compares to that of the hippocampus.
The study, “Human intelligence relates to neural measures of cognitive map formation,” was authored by Rebekka M. Tenderra and Stephanie Theves.
