Aron K. Barbey

Aron Barbey received a B.A. from the University of Texas at Dallas in 1999, and a Ph.D. in Psychology from Emory University, Atlanta, Georgia, in 2007.

From 2007-2011 Barbey was a Postdoctoral Fellow in the Cognitive Neuroscience Section of the National Institute of Neurological Disorders and Stroke at the National Institutes of Health, Bethesda, Maryland.

There he studied Vietnam veterans affected by brain trauma. They experienced differential deficits depending on the locations and size of their injuries. Barbey also served as an adjunct professor of psychology at Georgetown University, Washington, D.C., beginning in 2008.

In 2011 Barbey was appointed to the College of Applied Health Sciences at the University of Illinois, and became an Institute Affiliate of the Beckman Institute for Advanced Science and Technology.

By 2012, he was the director of the Decision Neuroscience Laboratory at the Beckman Institute.

In 2018, the Center for Brain Plasticity at the Beckman Institute was formed, under the leadership of co-directors Aron Barbey and Neal J. Cohen, leaders of the center's Intelligence, Learning, and Plasticity (ILP) Initiative.

Aron Barbey is Associate Editor of Frontiers in Human Neuroscience. Barbey is also on the Editorial Boards of NeuroImage, Intelligence, and Thinking & Reasoning.

He is a co-editor of the Cambridge Handbook of Intelligence and Cognitive Neuroscience (2021).

Network neuroscience theory of human intelligence

Barbey has proposed a network neuroscience theory of human intelligence that emphasizes brain plasticity, in which "general intelligence reflects individual differences in the efficiency and flexibility of brain networks" and "the capacity to integrate information across the brain as a whole". According to this view, "crystallized intelligence" involves the ability to rapidly access existing representations of knowledge and experience while "fluid intelligence" involves the ability to solve novel problems in ways that are adaptive and flexible.