The cognitive impact of the education revolution: A possible cause of the Flynn Effect on population IQ
Section snippets
Rising population cognitive performance and exposure to education
Mean IQ test scores of cohorts of American adults increased by approximately 25 points over the last 90 years, a period during which successive cohorts of children and youth were exposed to more formal education as shown in Fig. 1. For Japan, South Korea, and nations of Western Europe, where there is a history of large-scale IQ testing, similar Flynn Effects and increases in educational attainment have been reported (Flynn, 1984, Flynn, 1987, Lynn, 2009a, Lynn and Meisenberg, 2010, te Nijenhuis
Study 1. Neuroimaging experiment: conjoint fMRI analysis of CEFs and calculation schooling tasks
Establishing schooling-related activation of the neural substrate involved in CEF performance is a necessary first step to test H1 and satisfy causal condition 1. Functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) and analysis of its blood oxygenation level dependent (BOLD) changes yield data about regional brain activation during performance of specific tasks. The ontogenetic-causal logic behind fMRI evidence is supported by a large set of empirical findings concluding that the neurodevelopment of
Discussion
Overall, the neurological, cognitive, and textbook-analysis results support the three-part schooling-cognition enhancement hypothesis, and for each set of findings there is supplemental corroborating evidence from related research.
The findings from Study 1 provide neurological evidence for H1 as brain activations associated with mathematical problem solving shared a common neural substrate with relational reasoning and other CEF capacities during the developmental years of schooling. These
Implications of the schooling-cognitive enhancement hypothesis
If future research supports the current findings that the education revolution is one cause of rising population IQ over the past century, there are several major implications. Emerging conclusions from the study of human genetics and the ontogenesis of neuro-cognition indicate that neurological and cognitive development occurs through activity-dependent neural plasticity (e.g., Quartz & Sejnowski, 1997). In other words, inheritance of genetic potential for intelligence and relevant
Acknowledgments
The authors acknowledge funding from the National Science Foundation (SES-0826712; SES-1155924).
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2022, IntelligenceCitation Excerpt :Even though Flynn effect results are typically reported as linear decadal changes (as is done here as well), this is due to the typical design properties of Flynn effect studies, which do not allow for a continuous assessment. Therefore, differences between individual intervals in test score changes on the same test could be attributed to genuine changes of the Flynn effect strength or direction due to different influences (e.g., educational reforms; see Baker et al., 2015). However, non-linearity is unsuitable to explain why different tests that measure the same construct yield vastly differing effect trajectories over virtually identical time-spans.
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2022, IntelligenceCitation Excerpt :In this study the observed genotypic declines noted in previous work were shown to predict actual phenotypic declines among g.h components, thus linking the genetic to the phenotypic declines, evidencing the co-occurrence model. We have already seen above in Section 3 that various predictions made by the co-occurrence model have been supported (albeit not wholly without controversy, e.g., Baker et al., 2015; Demeneix, 2017, p. 87; Dodonova & Dodonov, 2013; Gonthier et al., 2021) with respect to the negative Flynn effect (in two countries), simple visual and auditory reaction times, color acuity, utilization frequencies of high-difficulty vocabulary items sampled across texts, working memory capacity, three-dimensional rotation ability, and phenotypic indicators of declining developmental stability. On the basis of the Lakatosian standard, whereby the hallmark of scientific progress is that it “leads to the discovery of hitherto unknown novel facts” (Lakatos, 1978b, p. 5), it is indeed the case that the PSRP, with the co-occurrence model as its latest and most sophisticated theoretical development, has to be considered progressive.18