Escaping the riptide : probing the malleability of cognition

Cognitive abilities are essential for functioning in daily life – even something as mundane as going to the grocery store taps into a variety of cognitive functions. Exactly how and under what circumstances they can be improved has led to over a century of academic debate. There is a paradox in intelligence research whereby high stability coexists alongside substantial malleability. Here, we investigate multiple points of malleability.

First, in Study I we show how spatial training generalizes to improved mathematics in children. We find non-verbal reasoning training and working memory training to improve mathematics in children significantly more than mental rotation training. In Study II, we take this a step further by comparing the training improvement from 25 days of working memory training to similar improvement over 2 years of natural development. We find a genetic marker to explain both equally, suggesting a common mechanism is behind both training and natural development.

Study III examined how socioeconomic status (SES) – one of the largest causes for interindividual differences in cognition – affected working memory and surface area over adolescents. We found SES to exert a large influence on both when controlling for genetics. Crucially, SES’s effect on the cortex seemed to be distributed and wide-ranging – not affecting any specific areas.

Lastly, Study IV estimated the effect of schooling on cognition and intelligence – finding large schooling effects in each domain tested. We then took it a step further to see if schooling interacted with either SES or genetics. We found this not to be the case, yet even with over 6,500 children, our study was potentially underpowered. The common theme of all these studies was to probe under what circumstance cognition changes – across the board, we found evidence of malleability.

List of scientific papers

I. Judd, N., & Klingberg, T. (2021). Training spatial cognition enhances mathematical learning in a randomized study of 17,000 children. Nature Human Behaviour. 5, 1548–1554.
https://doi.org/10.1038/s41562-021-01118-4

II. Sauce, B., Wiedenhoeft, J., Judd, N., & Klingberg, T. (2021). Change by challenge: A common genetic basis behind childhood cognitive development and cognitive training. NPJ Science of Learning. 6, 1–16.
https://doi.org/10.1038/s41539-021-00096-6

III. Judd, N., Sauce, B., Wiedenhoeft, J., Tromp, J., Chaarani, B., Schliep, A., van Noort, B., Penttilä, J., Grimmer, Y., Insensee, C., Becker, A., Banaschewski, T., Bokde, A. L. W., Quinlan, E. B., Desrivières, S., Flor, H., Grigis, A., Gowland, P., Heinz, A., … Klingberg, T. (2020). Cognitive and brain development is independently influenced by socioeconomic status and polygenic scores for educational attainment. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America. 117(22), 12411–12418.
https://doi.org/10.1073/pnas.2001228117

IV. Judd, N., Sauce, B., & Klingberg, T. (2021). The malleability of intelligence: the effects of schooling, genetic factors, socioeconomic status, and their interplay in children. [Manuscript]
https://doi.org/10.31234/osf.io/96pj4