In this study of students at a masters degree-granting public university, Dr. Zerovnik looked for possible relationships between media preferences for simple or more complex media content and practical intelligence (also known as non-verbal intelligence or "street smarts"), as well as various demographic and cultural factors. The author expected to find that people who scored higher on the Ravens Progressive Matrices assessment tool for pattern-matching ability would also prefer more complicated story lines, and do so in a linear fashion. The results failed to confirm this hypothesis,...