How people’s cognitive abilities are changing across the generations.
This parenting strategy leads to children with IQs 6 points higher.
This parenting strategy leads to children with IQs 6 points higher.
Children raised by nurturing parents develop higher IQs, research finds.
Many of the children in the study, who were raised in Brazil and South Africa, had faced considerable adversity, such as poverty and low birth weight.
But when they experienced responsive caregiving and the opportunity to learn, it was possible for them to reach their full potential.
Responsive caregiving involves being sensitive to the needs of the child and knowing how to respond to them.
Typical nurturing activities include reading to the child, playing games with letters and numbers as well as singing songs together.
Professor Maureen Black, study co-author, said:
“We found that adolescents who were raised in nurturing environments had IQ scores that were on average 6 points higher than those who were not.
This is a striking difference that has profound implications by increasing the intelligence of entire communities.
A nurturing environment also led to better growth and fewer psycho-social difficulties in adolescence, but it did not mitigate the effects of early adversities on growth and psycho-social difficulties.”
The research included over 1,600 children who were tracked from birth to their teenage years.
Both prenatal and early life adversity tends to lower IQ and is linked to problems adjusting psychologically.
However, a nurturing environment created by caregivers counteracts the disadvantages of early adversity.
Professor Black said:
“I think our findings could apply to communities here in the U.S. where children are hungry, living in poverty or lacking in access to medical care.”
Getting involved with children is the key, said Professor Black:
“Get children involved in friendly activities as much as possible rather than parking them in front of a screen.
Children love to learn and in a nurturing environment they can grow into adolescents and adults with the abilities to care for themselves, their families, and their communities.”
The study was published in The Lancet Child & Adolescent Health (Trude et al., 2020).
The brains of highly intelligent individuals are better at staying focused, the research suggests.
The brains of highly intelligent individuals are better at staying focused, the research suggests.
People with higher IQs have more stable interactions between regions of their brain, a study finds.
The finding contributes to the scientific debate on what makes some people more intelligent than others.
Some say that high IQ brains are more efficient, others that it is superior connections between brain regions that generate higher cognitive abilities.
This study suggests a more subtle answer: that it is stability in processing that produces the best neural results.
Higher intelligence is linked to states of high integration in the brain: when different areas are working well together.
It is as though the brains of people with higher intelligence are able to coordinate the different regions more efficiently.
Dr Kirsten Hilger, the study’s first author, said:
“The study of the temporal dynamics of human brain networks using fMRI is a relatively new field of research.
The temporally more stable network organisation in more intelligent individuals could be a protective mechanism of the brain against falling into maladaptive network states in which major networks disconnect and communication may be hampered.”
The study included 281 people who were given brain scans and IQ tests.
Researchers analysed the brain scans for how integrated they were over time.
The brain has a modular structure: one area is devoted to vision, another to the emotions, still another to making decisions and so on.
However, what this study found was that integration between the modules was linked to higher IQ.
The researchers found that this integration was most marked in regions of the brain that are important for attention.
Dr Hilger said:
“At present, we do not know whether the temporally more stable brain connections are a source or a consequence of higher intelligence.
However, our results suggest that processes of controlled attention – that is, the ability to stay focused and to concentrate on a task – may play an important role for general intelligence.”
The study was published in the journal Human Brain Mapping (Hilger et al., 2019).
Three ways to tell if you have a high IQ.
Three ways to tell if you have a high IQ.
People who can predict the behaviour of others have higher personal intelligence, research finds.
Two other signs of high personal intelligence are self-motivation and being able to anticipate desires.
The idea of personal intelligence is broader than IQ.
It involves using intelligence to predict people’s behaviour.
Someone high in personal intelligence is able to analyse correctly their own and other people’s personalities.
People high in personal IQ know how best to deal with other people and how they will react.
Professor John Mayer, the expert on personality and intelligence who came up with the theory, said:
“Think of all the ways we read and interpret the people around us each day: We notice body language and facial expressions to estimate one another’s moods.
We draw initial guesses about personalities based on how people dress and present themselves, and we adjust how we interact with them accordingly.
We run through scenarios in our heads, trying to anticipate how others will react, in order to choose the best course in dealing with a boss, a coworker, or a partner.”
Reviewing decades of research on personality and intelligence, Professor Mayer has found it comes more naturally to some:
“We pick up on small pieces of feedback about ourselves from others, which we incorporate into a fuller and more accurate perception of ourselves.
And we make all kinds of decisions–about work-life balance, the neighborhood we live in, or who we spend our time with–based on what we think will be the best fit for our personalities.”
Professor Mayer concludes:
“People who are high in personal intelligence are able to anticipate their own desires and actions, predict the behavior of others, motivate themselves over the long term, and make better life decisions.”
→ Discover 22 more signs of intelligence.
The book is called Personal Intelligence: The Power of Personality and How It Shapes Our Lives and is published by Scientific American/Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2014.
This parental behaviour is linked to more intelligent children.
This parental behaviour is linked to more intelligent children.
Children whose parents are ‘chatterboxes’ tend to have higher IQs, research finds.
Children hearing more speech from their caregivers had better reasoning and numeracy skills, the observational study found.
Some children in the study heard twice as many words as others.
Perhaps less surprisingly, children who heard higher quality speech from their parents, using a more diverse vocabulary, knew more words themselves.
For the study, tiny audio recorders were fitted to 107 children aged between 2 and 4.
They were recorded for 16 hours a day for three days at home.
Ms Katrina d’Apice, the study’s first author, explained the results:
“Using the audio recorders allowed us to study real-life interactions between young children and their families in an unobtrusive way within the home environment rather than a lab setting.
We found that the quantity of adult spoken words that children hear is positively associated with their cognitive ability.
However, further research is needed to explore the reasons behind this link — it could be that greater exposure to language provides more learning opportunities for children, but it could also be the case that more intelligent children evoke more words from adults in their environment.”
While parental talk was linked to children’s cognitive abilities, their parenting strategy was linked to their behaviour.
Specifically, positive parenting was linked to less aggression, disobedience and restlessness.
Positive parenting involves responding to children in positive ways and encouraging them to explore the world.
Professor Sophie von Stumm, study co-author, said:
“This study is the largest naturalistic observation of early life home environments to date.
We found that the quantity of adult spoken words that children were exposed to varied greatly within families.
Some kids heard twice as many words on one day as they did on the next.
The study highlights the importance of treating early life experiences as dynamic and changeable rather than static entities — approaching research in this way will help us to understand the interplay between environmental experiences and children’s differences in development.”
The study was published in the journal Developmental Psychology (d’Apice et al., 2019).
This is not something people usually associate with intelligence — but the study clearly shows a link.
This is not something people usually associate with intelligence — but the study clearly shows a link.
Highly intelligent people are more likely to be generous and altruistic, psychological research finds.
Altruistic people are unselfish and sometimes deny themselves so that others can have more.
Intelligent people may be more generous partly because they can afford it.
People with higher IQs generally have greater resources, or can expect to recover what they have given later on.
Generosity is not something people usually associate with intelligence — but this study clearly shows a link.
The study’s authors write:
“In the first study, we found that those who contributed more than their fair share to a public good were more intelligent, as measured by two relatively independent measures of general intelligence.
In the second study, we showed that those who possess a dispositional tendency to value joint benefits more than
their own, scored higher on an intelligence test.”
For the study, 301 people played games that involved either donating to others or keeping things for themselves.
The results revealed that intelligent people were more generous to others.
People who were more egotistical — keeping more for themselves — tended to be less intelligent.
People with higher IQs were more concerned with the public good.
The authors write:
“The evidence presented supports the possibility that unconditional altruism may serve as a costly signal of general intelligence because altruism is costly and is reliably linked to the quality ‘general intelligence’.
Consistent with the finding that children’s intelligence
predicts later socio-economic success better than parents’ attributes, we assume that intelligence is an indicator of future resources.As a consequence, someone with high cognitive skills may be able to donate more in advance than someone with lower skills.”
In other words, intelligent people can afford to be more generous because they have more to give.
The study was published in the Journal of Research in Personality (Millet & Dewitte, 2007).
The traits are so powerful that they are linked to intelligence when measured almost 40 years later.
The traits are so powerful that they are linked to intelligence when measured almost 40 years later.
Insatiable curiosity, an active fantasy life, a sensitivity to emotions and an appreciation of art and beauty are all linked to high IQ, a study finds.
High IQ may have a particularly strong link to curiosity because intelligence creates a ‘cognitive hunger’ — a desire to think.
Over the years, higher IQ drives people to keep exploring new experiences to satiate this hunger.
Curiosity, along with sensitivity to emotions, appreciation of beauty and an active fantasy life are all aspects of the major personality trait called ‘openness to experience’.
Being open to experience is so powerful that it is linked to intelligence when measured almost 40 years later.
Children who scored higher on IQ tests at just 11-years-old were more open to experience when they were 50-years-old, the psychologists found.
The study’s authors explain their results:
“…childhood intelligence is indeed positively associated with adult trait Openness, even when it was assessed almost four decades earlier when participants were at 11 years.
Intelligence may influence the development of personality in that intelligent people develop habits to satisfy their curiosity and ‘‘cognitive hunger’’ which are an essential ingredient of Openness.”
The conclusions come from a huge study of 17,415 people born in the UK in one week in March 1958.
Over the following 50 years they were given various personality and intelligence tests.
Children with higher IQs were more open to experience because of higher motivation at school, greater support from their families and higher social status, the researchers found.
They explain how these factors fit together:
“Parents of higher socioeconomic status may foster children’s trait Openness by providing better resources such as choosing good schools and cultural environment (theaters, museums, traveling abroad, etc.); intelligent children tend to use more mental activities (such as abstract ideas, learning new
vocabularies, or math formulas) than those who are less intelligent; school settings (quality of teaching, good facilities) may enhance pupils to engage more in school learning.All these three factors may influence educational and
occupational achievement, which in turn, may increase
the scores on Openness.”
In other words, they believe that it is a higher IQ that mainly drives the development of greater openness to experience.
The study was published in the Journal of Individual Differences (Furnham & Cheng, 2016).
This sign indicates stronger reasoning and better analytical and conceptual thinking.
This sign indicates stronger reasoning and better analytical and conceptual thinking.
Being a ‘night owl’ is a sign of high IQ, research finds.
Night owls prefer to stay up late at night and rise later in the morning.
This sleep pattern is linked to stronger reasoning and better analytical and conceptual thinking.
Despite higher intelligence, night owls tend to get slightly worse grades in school.
This may be because the school day starts too early for them.
Morning types who rise early, also known as ‘larks’, tend to do around 8% better in school.
Later in life, though, the higher intelligence of night owls tends to shine through.
Once in the world of work, night owls tend to do better because of their higher intelligence.
Higher inductive reasoning abilities, in particular, are linked to more prestigious jobs and higher incomes.
Around one-third of the population are night owls, with one-quarter preferring to rise early.
The remainder fall somewhere in between, being neither early risers nor late sleepers.
The conclusions come from a study of 887 adolescents in Spain.
All were given tests of intelligence and this was compared to their performance in school and sleep habits.
The results showed that night owls had higher IQs but did worse in school.
This could be partly explained by night owls being nonconformists, the authors write:
“Evening adolescents tend to act out in an independent and nonconforming manner and resist following traditional standards (perhaps early morning schedules), also they tend to be creative, something that probably is not promoted at school.”
Commenting on the study, Professor Jim Horne, of Loughborough University, said:
“Evening types tend to be the more extrovert creative types, the poets, artists and inventors, while the morning types are the deducers, as often seen with civil servants and accountants.
We have looked at morning and evening types and we found that personalities tended to be different.
Evening types were more social, more people-oriented.
They will probably be good at cryptic crosswords, while morning types go for the more logical ones.”
The study was published in the journal Personality and Individual Differences (Díaz-Morales & Escribano, 2013).
Fluid intelligence is the ability to solve problems, apply logic and identify patterns.
Fluid intelligence is the ability to solve problems, apply logic and identify patterns.
Having larger pupils is linked to higher fluid intelligence, a study finds.
Fluid intelligence is the ability to solve problems, apply logic and identify patterns.
It is contrasted with crystallised intelligence, which involves using skills, knowledge and experience.
The differences are visible to the unaided eye, despite the relatively small size of the pupils.
The pupils are the black part in the centre of the eye.
They open and close in response to the amount of light falling on them.
The pupils also respond to how much work the brain is doing and other psychological factors.
The study’s authors explain:
“Starting in the 1960s it became apparent to psychologists that the size of the pupil is related to more than just the amount of light entering the eyes.
Pupil size also reflects internal mental processes.
For instance, in a simple memory span task, pupil size precisely tracks changes in memory load, dilating with each new item held in memory and constricting as each item is subsequently recalled.”
Dilated pupils have been shown to reflect when a person’s brain is overloaded with information, how interested a person is in what is being said to them, whether they are in pain and much more.
For the study, 40 people’s baseline pupil size was measured — half were in the top quartile for intelligence, the other half in the bottom quartile.
Baseline pupil size is measured when a person is sitting down, not doing too much.
The authors describe the results:
“…we have shown that large differences in baseline pupil size, even observable to the unaided eye, exist between high and low cognitive ability individuals engaged in a cognitively demanding task and cannot be explained by differences in mental effort.”
The study was published in the journal Cognitive Psychology (Tsukahara et al., 2016).
People with higher intelligence tend to have this musical ability.
People with higher intelligence tend to have this musical ability.
People who can learn a tune more easily have higher intelligence, research suggests.
People with higher IQs were able to learn to play “Happy Birthday” on the piano more accurately in the study.
Whether or not people believed they could improve did not seem to matter.
Instead, pure intelligence predicted how well they did, not a ‘growth mindset’.
A growth mindset is a belief that basic abilities can be improved through hard work.
Musical aptitude was the only other factor that mattered, said Mr Alexander Burgoyne, the study’s first author:
“The strongest predictor of skill acquisition was intelligence, followed by music aptitude.
By contrast, the correlation between growth mindset and piano performance was about as close to zero as possible.”
The study included 171 people who had little or no experience playing the piano.
All were given tests of their mindset and their intelligence.
They followed a video guide that taught them to play “Happy Birthday”, which contained 25 notes.
Afterwards they were rated on their performance of the simple song.
The results showed that IQ mattered most in predicting who did well.
When IQ was taken into account, even musical aptitude paled into insignificance.
Mr Burgoyne said:
“The results were surprising, because people have claimed that mindset plays an important role when students are confronted with challenges, like trying to learn a new musical instrument.
And yet, it didn’t predict skill acquisition.”
There were also some interesting patterns in the results:
Mr Burgoyne said:
“Our study examined one of the earliest stages of skill acquisition.
Early experiences can be formative, but I would caution against drawing conclusions about skilled musicians based on our study of beginners.”
The study was published in the journal Intelligence (Burgoyne et al., 2019).
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