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Slow Starters Have Higher IQ?
lockefire writes "Science Daily is reporting that children with 'superior' IQ's tend to have a slow start in the development of their cortex. These children have a 'delayed but prolonged' spurt that causes their cortex thickness to peak later than their peers and thin much quicker. This effect is most evident in the pre-frontal cortex. 'People with very agile minds tend to have a very agile cortex,' says Dr. Philip Shaw of the NIMH."
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I suspect that this is unlikely, and not because Nature is the answer to everything, but because I don't think that being made fun of for being behind makes 100% of those students work harder to make themselves smarter.
The real finding here provides dramatic support to the Nature side of the debate. Students that end up being identified as the most intelligent are those whose cortices (the site of higher cognitive thought) continue to develop for longer, hitting their peak much later than their less gifted counterparts. As such, two possible explanations jump to mind for why students whose cortical growth peaks latest are those which are the smartest: 1) the cortex simply develops for longer, or 2) these kids have had a much richer set of experiences by the time their cortices stop growing. In either case, the growth of the cortex is probably heavily determined by genetics, but presumably can be affected by Nurture to a certain extent.
Although I don't remember the details now, there was a study done somewhere in Europe about a decade ago on a sperm bank that accepted donations only from those men judged highly intelligent to try to figure out how much of the result childrens' intelligence was attributable to the biological father, and how much was due to the conditions in which each child was raised. These kids ended up having an unusually large number of prodigies, which suggests to me that Nature (for better or worse) plays the major role in determining intelligence. That being said, if you're a horrible parent, you'll screw life up for your kid, and he/she may never be able to realize his/her potential.
Where the heck in this article would you get that it's "slow starters" ?
Now, there may be something about the somewhat different early development of the brain for these smarter kids with the thicker, later-maturing cortexes, and how that changes their early behavior compared to others, but TFA ( and the study ) didn't cover that, now, did they ?
Damn crappy wrong article summaries like this make me mad... somewhat at the submitters, but mostly at the admins. Thanks for actually reading and interpreting ( incorrectly ) the article, ScuttleMonkey !
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All three were highly talented in their fields at a very early age.
I'm sure I could find plenty more examples given time.
Could you please name the countries that 1) always show the highest test scores and 2) let kids out of school as early as age 10?
Finland is, as I remember, one of those high-scoring countries, but the Basic Education page at the Finnish National Board of Education site says "Basic Education means the general education provided for each age group in its entirety. It is intended for children from seven to sixteen years of age, and its completion in comprehensive school takes nine years."
Japan is another of the high-scoring countries; the US Library of Congress Country Studies information on Japan says under "Primary and Secondary Education" that, at least as of 1994, "Education is compulsory and free for all schoolchildren from the first through the ninth grades" and a diagram in the report (PDF) indicates that this runs up to age 14. (The page on "Upper-Secondary Education" indicates that, even after age 14, "94 percent of all lower-secondary school graduates entered uppersecondary schools in 1989".)
For a long time scientists thought that the bigger the brain, the smarter the person. Come to find out there's no significant statistical correlation there.
Misleading. Cranial size DOES correlate with higher IQ in groups but within those groups are great variation that does not correlate with cranial size.
Also, there are so many different kinds of intelligence that an IQ test is pretty much meaningless. I've worked with plenty of people who had a very high IQ but were completely ineffective either because of psychological weirdnesses or because they couldn't focus enough to get anything done.
IQ doesn't measure how well you percieve someone or like someone. I know its acceptable amongst "average" people to try to demean others who are smarter than them by claiming that IQ isn't all its cracked up to be or that smart people are somehow really inferior people.
IQ tests try to measure something called "G", which is basically a standard conception of intelligence that is measured in several different ways. Reputable IQ tests use a standard battery of different question types to do this..
i am a psychologist and know a bit about diagnostics. IQ-tests are not that bad in predicting success at work. a good IQ Test will explain for example about 30% of the variance in many positions, same as biographical data. naturally, they dont explain totally different parts of the variance but its still economically to use both information. also IQ-tests differ a lot in quality. most tests currently used are still based on classical test theory which has some major problems. modern propabilistic tests, especially those based on the rasch modell, are far superior in many ways. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rasch_model . if you can show me a reliable(>0.8) test for "organizing the external world" which has high internal and external validity and is not prone to manipulation please tell me. Dont forget that there are limits to what we are able to predict. If you have a model that explains more than 50% of the variance you have propably made a methodological mistake(kline, 1998). life is unpredictable in many ways(accidents, divorce, finding a good social network..)but the problem is that we cant accept that fact.
The evidence points strongly towards a biological bias in intelligence, at least if only for IQ. Identical twins reared apart and independently have IQ correlations of 0.8+, which is basically the correlation needed for test-retest reliability. By that I mean that testing one twin is equivalent to testing the other. Non-related children reared in the same family (by adoption or such) have an IQ correlation of 0.
The nurture theory proposes that children reared apart should have IQs that continually diverge, given their socioeconomic differences. This is not true.
The only real difference occurs when children are reared at poverty or below-poverty levels, where they are unable to attain nutrients to sustain adequate physiological growth.