General cognitive ability (or general intelligence; g) is a latent variable that describes performance across a broad array of cognitive skills. This general influence on cognitive ability varies between individuals and shares a similar structure in both humans and mice. Evidence suggests that much of the variation in general intelligence is related to the efficacy of the working memory system. We have previously observed that one component of the working memory system, selective attention, disproportionately accounts for the relationship between working memory and general intelligence in genetically heterogeneous mice. In the three studies reported here, we test a hypothesis that emerges from human behavioral studies which suggests that attentional disengagement, a sub-component of selective attention, critically mediates its relationship with g. Studies 1 and 2 both assess the factor loadings (on a principal component analysis) of the performance of mice on an array of learning tasks as well as tasks designed to make explicit demands on attentional disengagement. We find that attentional disengagement tasks load more highly than measures of cognitive performance that place less explicit demands on disengagement and that performance in these disengagement tasks is strongly predictive of the general cognitive performance of individual animals. In Study 3 we observed that groups of mice (young and old) with known differences in general cognitive abilities differ more on a discrimination task that requires attentional disengagement than on a simple discrimination task with fewer demands on disengagement. In total, these results provide support for the hypothesis that attentional disengagement is strongly related to general intelligence, and that variations in this ability may contribute to both individual differences in intelligence as well as age-related cognitive declines.

一般认知能力（或一般智力；g）是一个潜在变量，用于描述各种认知技能的表现。这种对认知能力的一般影响因人而异，并且在人类和小鼠中具有相似的结构。有证据表明，一般智力的许多变化都与工作记忆系统的功效有关。我们以前已经观察到工作记忆系统的一个组成部分，即选择性注意，不成比例地解释了遗传异质小鼠中工作记忆与一般智力之间的关系。在本文报道的三项研究中，我们检验了人类行为研究中提出的一个假设，该假设表明注意分离是选择性注意的一个子组成部分，关键地介导了它与g的关系。。研究1和2都评估了一系列学习任务以及旨在对注意力分离提出明确要求的任务的行为（基于主成分分析）的因素负荷。我们发现，注意力分离任务的负荷比认知能力的测量负荷高，后者对分离的要求不那么明确，而这些分离任务的表现强烈地预测了个体动物的总体认知能力。在研究3中，我们发现，具有一般认知能力差异的小鼠（青年和老年）组在需要注意力脱离的辨别任务上的差异要比对注意力分离较少的简单辨别任务的差异更大。总共，