Smarts
Three dopaminergic polymorphisms are associated with academic achievement in middle and high school
Kevin Beaver, Michael Vaughn, John Paul Wright, Matt DeLisi & Matthew Howard
Intelligence, forthcoming
Abstract:
Although academic achievement is a heritable construct, to date research has yet to explore its molecular genetic underpinnings. Drawing on data from the National Longitudinal Study of Adolescent Health, the current longitudinal study investigated the associations between polymorphisms in three dopaminergic genes (DAT1, DRD2, and DRD4) and academic achievement during middle and high school (Ns ranged between 622 and 2181). Findings revealed statistically significant associations between the three dopaminergic polymorphisms and a composite genetic risk index with English, math, history, and science grades.
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Following in Your Parents' Footsteps? Empirical Analysis of Matched Parent-Offspring Test Scores
Sarah Brown, Steven Mcintosh & Karl Taylor
Oxford Bulletin of Economics and Statistics, forthcoming
Abstract:
In this article, we explore whether an intergenerational relationship exists between the reading and mathematics test scores, taken at age 7, of a cohort of individuals born in 1958 and the equivalent test scores of their offspring measured in 1991. Our results suggest that how the parent performs in reading and mathematics during their childhood is positively related to the corresponding test scores of their offspring as measured at a similar age. The results further suggest that the effect of upbringing is mainly responsible for the intergenerational relationship in literacy, although genetic effects seem more relevant with respect to numeracy.
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Using creativity to reduce ethnic bias in college admissions
James Kaufman
Review of General Psychology, September 2010, Pages 189-203
Abstract:
College admissions testing typically focuses on grade point average (GPA) and SAT scores. Without disputing the importance of these predictors, one may wonder whether they are enough by themselves to determine eventual academic success. One possible additional construct, creativity, is examined via the lens of nonbiased assessment. It is argued that creativity can help reduce bias in two ways. First, adding creativity as a supplement to current assessments would present a truer reflection of a person's overall intellectual abilities. Second, most studies have found that different ethnicities perform comparably on creativity tasks, and some minority groups may be more likely to see themselves as creative. Including creativity as a component of standardized tests may, therefore, reduce stereotype threat.
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Maike Malda, Fons van de Vijver & Michael Temane
Intelligence, forthcoming
Abstract:
In this study, cross-cultural differences in cognitive test scores are hypothesized to depend on a test's cultural complexity (Cultural Complexity Hypothesis: CCH), here conceptualized as its content familiarity, rather than on its cognitive complexity (Spearman's Hypothesis: SH). The content familiarity of tests assessing short-term memory, attention, working memory, and figural and verbal fluid reasoning, was manipulated by constructing test versions with an item content derived from either Afrikaans or Tswana culture in South Africa. Both test versions were administered to children of both cultures. The sample consisted of 161 urban Afrikaans, 181 urban, and 159 rural Tswana children (Mage = 9.37 years). Children generally performed best on the test version that was designed for their own group, particularly on the cognitively and culturally complex working memory and figural fluid reasoning tests. This relation between content familiarity and cognitive test performance supports CCH and disconfirms SH.
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The virtues of opaque prose: How lay beliefs about fluency influence perceptions of quality
Jeff Galak & Leif Nelson
Journal of Experimental Social Psychology, forthcoming
Abstract:
Instructors tell their students to write clearly. This prescription meshes with our intuition, wins confirmation in scores of books on writing, and finds empirical confirmation in research on perceptual fluency: People like content that is easy to process. Nevertheless, in some circumstances people expect content to be difficult, and ease might be interpreted as a lack of quality. We investigate this possibility by asking people to judge the quality of written text which varies in fluency (through the manipulation of font and facial feedback). Across three studies, disfluent content was judged to be of higher quality when it was thought to come from a source focused on conveying information than one designed to maximize enjoyment.
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Individual differences in need for cognition and decision-making competence among leaders
Jessica Carnevale, Yoel Inbar & Jennifer Lerner
Personality and Individual Differences, forthcoming
Abstract:
When making decisions, people sometimes deviate from normative standards. While such deviations may appear to be alarmingly common, examining individual differences may reveal a more nuanced picture. Specifically, the personality factor of need for cognition (i.e., the extent to which people engage in and enjoy effortful cognitive activities; Cacioppo & Petty, 1982) may moderate decision makers' susceptibility to bias, as could personality factors associated with being a leader. As part of a large-scale assessment of high-level leaders, participants completed a battery of decision-making competence and personality scales. Leaders who scored higher on need for cognition performed better on two of four components of a decision-making competence measure: framing and honoring sunk costs. In addition, the leader sample performed better than published controls. Thus, both individual differences in need for cognition and leadership experience moderate susceptibility to decision biases. Implications for broader theories of individual differences and bias are discussed.
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Don't interrupt me! Task interruption depletes the self's limited resources
Nicholas Freeman & Mark Muraven
Motivation and Emotion, September 2010, Pages 230-241
Abstract:
It is a common occurrence in daily life to be interrupted prior to completing a task. Such interruptions may have deleterious effects for limited self-resources, especially if they occur just prior to task completion. This hypothesis was tested in three experiments. In the first two, participants initially engaged in a card sorting task, and then subsequently performed a self-control task. In Experiment 3, participants first engaged in a word search task and then worked on an executive function task. In all instances, participants who were interrupted just prior to attaining their goal of completing the initial task, but not those who were stopped earlier in the task or who were allowed to finish, showed evidence of impairment on the subsequent measures. The findings suggest that the desire to pursue a goal increases as goal attainment draws nearer, and that the amount of self-control needed to stop working on a task is modified by situational variables such as goal distance.
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The biological roots of complex thinking: Are heritable attitudes more complex?
Lucian Gideon Conway, Daniel Dodds, Kirsten Hands Towgood, Stacey McClure & James Olson
Journal of Personality, forthcoming
Abstract:
Are highly heritable attitudes more or less complex than less heritable attitudes? Over 2000 participant responses on topics varying in heritability were coded for overall integrative complexity and its two subcomponents (dialectical complexity and elaborative complexity). Across different heritability sets drawn from two separate prior twin research programs, the present results yielded a consistent pattern: Heritability was always significantly positively correlated with integrative complexity. Further analyses of the subcomponents suggested that the manner in which complexity was expressed differed by topic type: For societal topics, heritable attitudes were more likely to be expressed in dialectically complex terms, whereas for personally-involving topics, heritable attitudes were more likely to be expressed in elaboratively complex terms. Most of these relationships remained significant even when controlling for measurements of attitude strength. The authors discuss the genetic roots of complex versus simple attitudes, implications for understanding attitude development more broadly, and the contribution of these results to previous work on both heritability and complexity.
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Short-term meditation induces white matter changes in the anterior cingulate
Yi-Yuan Tang, Qilin Lu, Xiujuan Geng, Elliot Stein, Yihong Yang & Michael Posner
Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 31 August 2010, Pages 15649-15652
Abstract:
The anterior cingulate cortex (ACC) is part of a network implicated in the development of self-regulation and whose connectivity changes dramatically in development. In previous studies we showed that 3 h of mental training, based on traditional Chinese medicine (integrative body-mind training, IBMT), increases ACC activity and improves self-regulation. However, it is not known whether changes in white matter connectivity can result from small amounts of mental training. We here report that 11 h of IBMT increases fractional anisotropy (FA), an index indicating the integrity and efficiency of white matter in the corona radiata, an important white-matter tract connecting the ACC to other structures. Thus IBMT could provide a means for improving self-regulation and perhaps reducing or preventing various mental disorders.
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Less is more: How manipulative features affect children's learning from picture books
Medha Tare, Cynthia Chiong, Patricia Ganea & Judy DeLoache
Journal of Applied Developmental Psychology, September-October 2010, Pages 395-400
Abstract:
Picture books are ubiquitous in young children's lives and are assumed to support children's acquisition of information about the world. Given their importance, relatively little research has directly examined children's learning from picture books. We report two studies examining children's acquisition of labels and facts from picture books that vary on two dimensions: iconicity of the pictures and presence of manipulative features (or "pop-ups"). In Study 1, 20-month-old children generalized novel labels less well when taught from a book with manipulative features than from standard picture books without such elements. In Study 2, 30- and 36-month-old children learned fewer facts when taught from a manipulative picture book with drawings than from a standard picture book with realistic images and no manipulative features. The results of the two studies indicate that children's learning from picture books is facilitated by realistic illustrations, but impeded by manipulative features.
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A is for apple: Mnemonic symbols hinder the interpretation of algebraic expressions
Nicole McNeil et al.
Journal of Educational Psychology, August 2010, Pages 625-634
Abstract:
This study examined how literal symbols affect students' understanding of algebraic expressions. Middle school students (N = 322) were randomly assigned to 1 of 3 conditions in which they were asked to interpret an expression (e.g., 4c + 3b) in a story problem. Each literal symbol represented the price of an item. In the c-and-b condition, the symbols used were the 1st letters of the items (e.g., price of a cake in dollars = c; price of a brownie in dollars = b). In the other 2 conditions, c and b were replaced with nonmnemonic English letters (x and y) or Greek letters (Φ and Ψ). Incorrect interpretations of the expression were most common among students in the c-and-b condition. Moreover, students in this condition were more likely than students in the other conditions to misinterpret the symbols as labels for objects (e.g., c stands for cake). An analysis of participating students' textbooks revealed that mnemonic symbols were used correctly and were not uncommon. Results suggest that the use of mnemonic symbols may hinder students' interpretation of algebraic expressions.
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‘I bet you know more and are nicer too!': What children infer from others' accuracy
Patricia Brosseau-Liard & Susan Birch
Developmental Science, September 2010, Pages 772-778
Abstract:
Research has shown that preschoolers monitor others' prior accuracy and prefer to learn from individuals who have the best track record. We investigated the scope of preschoolers' attributions based on an individual's prior accuracy. Experiment 1 revealed that 5-year-olds (but not 4-year-olds) used an individual's prior accuracy at labelling to predict her knowledge of words and broader facts; they also showed a ‘halo effect' predicting she would be more prosocial. Experiment 2 confirmed that, overall, 4-year-olds did not make explicit generalizations of knowledge. These findings suggest that an individual's prior accuracy influences older preschoolers' expectations of that individual's broader knowledge as well as their impressions of how she will behave in social interactions.
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The robust beauty of ordinary information
Konstantinos Katsikopoulos, Lael Schooler & Ralph Hertwig
Psychological Review, forthcoming
Abstract:
Heuristics embodying limited information search and noncompensatory processing of information can yield robust performance relative to computationally more complex models. One criticism raised against heuristics is the argument that complexity is hidden in the calculation of the cue order used to make predictions. We discuss ways to order cues that do not entail individual learning. Then we propose and test the thesis that when orders are learned individually, people's necessarily limited knowledge will curtail computational complexity while also achieving robustness. Using computer simulations, we compare the performance of the take-the-best heuristic-with dichotomized or undichotomized cues-to benchmarks such as the naïve Bayes algorithm across 19 environments. Even with minute sizes of training sets, take-the-best using undichotomized cues excels. For 10 environments, we probe people's intuitions about the direction of the correlation between cues and criterion. On the basis of these intuitions, in most of the environments take-the-best achieves the level of performance that would be expected from learning cue orders from 50% of the objects in the environments. Thus, ordinary information about cues - either gleaned from small training sets or intuited - can support robust performance without requiring Herculean computations.