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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