“What this so-called ‘g-factor’ means is still very much up for debate,” explains researcher Rogier Kievit of the Cognition and Brain Science Unit at the University of Cambridge. “Is it a causal factor, an artefact of the way we create cognitive tests, the result of our educational environment, a consequence of genetics, an emergent phenomenon of a dynamic system or perhaps all of these things to varying degrees?”<\/p>\n In a new study, scientists from Cambridge, London, and Berlin led by Kievit directly compared different proposed explanations for the phenomenon of ‘g’\u00a0<\/em>and how it develops over time.<\/em>\u00a0Data was used from a Wellcome-funded longitudinal cohort (NSPN), where 785 late adolescents, ages 14 to 24, were tested on two occasions approximately 1.5 years apart. They focused two subtests reflecting key domains of ‘g’<\/em>, namely fluid reasoning (solving abstract puzzles) and vocabulary (knowing the definitions of words). Their findings are published in\u00a0Psychological Science<\/em>, a journal of the Association for Psychological Science.<\/p>\n The team observed that the best explanation for the improvement in skills over time was the so-called ‘mutualism’<\/em>\u00a0model<\/strong>. This model proposes that cognitive abilities help each other during development<\/strong>: In other words, better reasoning skills allow individuals to improve their vocabulary more quickly, and better vocabularies are associated with faster improvement in reasoning ability.<\/p>\n These findings are crucial to our understanding of cognitive abilities, as they suggest that small differences early on in childhood may lead to larger differences later on<\/strong>, and help partially explain how ‘g’<\/em>\u00a0arises.<\/p>\n The work has implications for important outcomes in adolescence.<\/p>\n “Our findings may be relevant for early detection of developmental challenges,” says Kievit. “Often screening tests for difficulties focus only on individual outcomes (i.e., ‘Is a child achieving the desired level on some test?’), but studying the dynamics between cognitive domains is likely to paint a richer, more accurate picture of the expected trajectory of development.”<\/p>\n And the findings may also shed light on more long-term life outcomes.<\/p>\n “General cognitive ability is strikingly predictive of various important life outcomes ranging from academic and professional success, to mental and physical health and even longevity<\/strong> — to understand why this is so, we must better understand what this g-factor really is,” Kievit explains.<\/p>\n The researchers note that their observations regarding links between cognitive abilities are exciting, but they do not address whether the relationships are directly causal in nature.<\/p>\n “We hope to further tease apart the underlying mechanisms in future work,” Kievit concludes.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/blockquote>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" From the\u00a0Association for Psychological Science press release: One of the most striking findings in psychology is that almost all cognitive abilities are positively related — on average, people who are… Read more »<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":5,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[10],"tags":[18,12],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/therapytoronto.ca\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/23190"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/therapytoronto.ca\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/therapytoronto.ca\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/therapytoronto.ca\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/5"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/therapytoronto.ca\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=23190"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/therapytoronto.ca\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/23190\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":23301,"href":"https:\/\/therapytoronto.ca\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/23190\/revisions\/23301"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/therapytoronto.ca\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=23190"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/therapytoronto.ca\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=23190"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/therapytoronto.ca\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=23190"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}![\"\"](\"http:\/\/therapytoronto.ca\/news\/wp-content\/uploads\/2017\/03\/Creativity.jpg\")
One of the most striking findings in psychology is that almost all cognitive abilities are positively related<\/strong> — on average, people who are better at a skill like reasoning are generally also better at a skill like vocabulary<\/strong>. This fact allows scientists and educational practitioners to summarize people’s skills on a wide range of domains as one factor — often called ‘<\/strong>g’<\/strong>,\u00a0<\/em>for ‘general intelligence<\/strong>‘. Despite this, the mechanisms underlying ‘g’ and its development remain somewhat mysterious.<\/p>\n