Abstract
Members of 192 families in the Tel Aviv area were given a battery of eight cognitive tests focusing on spatial measures but sampling verbal, numerical, and perceptual speed domains as well. The patterns of parent-child and sibling correlations gave very weak evidence, if any, for the operation of the X-linked recessive gene postulated by Stafford and others to affect performance on tasks involving spatial visualization. An analysis of male and female score distributions provided results more favorable to the X-linkage hypothesis, at least for the child generation, although suggesting that X linkage does not explain the whole male-female difference in performance on spatial tasks.
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This research was supported by funds from NSF Grant GU-1598 to the University of Texas.
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Loehlin, J.C., Sharan, S. & Jacoby, R. In pursuit of the “spatial gene”: A family study. Behav Genet 8, 27–41 (1978). https://doi.org/10.1007/BF01067702
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/BF01067702