For many of us, hazard perception was one of the more fun and less nerve-wracking parts of the driving test. But if spotting the unexpected doesn't fall within your skillset, scientists warn you may experience'inattentional blindness'. Researchers at New York University (NYU) have recreated the classic'invisible gorilla test' from over 20 years ago in an effort to understand our capabilities. More than 1,500 participants were shown unsuspecting footage of six people throwing two basketballs between them. While viewers were asked to simply count how many times those wearing white pass the ball, this was not the real test at all.

In 1997 IBM Supercomputer Deep Blue defeated world chess champion Garry Kasparov by a four games to two score in a six game series. This was a landmark moment in the development of what we might call "thinking machines", as a computer had proven itself better than the best human in what was then the world's most prestigious strategy game. The benchmark of a machine defeating a human at chess has mattered for hundreds of years. Famously, the mechanical Turk developed in 1770 thrilled and confounded luminaries as notable as Napoleon Bonaparte and Benjamin Franklin. Simply an elaborate hoax, the human-powered, not-quite-automaton fooled the public for almost 100 years.

Scientists have long known that our ability to think quickly and recall information, also known as fluid intelligence, peaks around age 20 and then begins a slow decline. However, more recent findings, including a new study from neuroscientists at MIT and Massachusetts General Hospital (MGH), suggest that the real picture is much more complex. The study, which appears in the journal Psychological Science, finds that different components of fluid intelligence peak at different ages, some as late as age 40. "At any given age, you're getting better at some things, you're getting worse at some other things, and you're at a plateau at some other things. There's probably not one age at which you're peak on most things, much less all of them," says Joshua Hartshorne, a postdoc in MIT's Department of Brain and Cognitive Sciences and one of the paper's authors.