Good Sense and Good Chemistry: Neurochemical Correlates of Cognitive Performance Assessed In Vivo through Magnetic Resonance Spectroscopy

Intelligence is an extensively researched and psychometrically robust construct, whose biological validity remains insufficiently elucidated. The extant theorizing about neural mechanisms of intelligence links better reasoning abilities to the efficiency of information processing by the brain as a system (Neubauer & Fink, 2009), to the structural and functional integrity of the network connecting critically important brain hubs (a parietal-frontal integration or P-FIT theory, Jung & Haier, 2007), and to properties of specific brain regions, such as the prefrontal cortices (Duncan, Emslie, Williams, Johnson, & Freer, 1996). Gathering data for testing these theories is a complicated enterprise that involves interrogating the brain from multiple perspectives. Despite recent promising work on multimodal imaging (Sui, Huster, Yu, Segall, & Calhoun, 2014), it is still unrealistic to assess all relevant aspects of the brain at once. Thus, the investigators are compelled to evaluate specific salient features of the brain’s structure and function.