8 ms·

IQ Isn't Set In Stone, Suggests Study That Finds Big Jumps, Dips In Teens

42 points by llambda 15y ago

ern 15y ago
Link to original study: http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/vaop/ncurrent/full/nature10514.html http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/vaop/ncurrent/full/natu...
- llambda 15y ago
  Nature is paywalled so only the abstract is viewable for me.
  - asolove 15y ago
    "Nature is paywalled" is a sentence I fear I will see again, with a different meaning, at some time in the future.
  - afterburner 15y ago
    Great phrase.
rhizome 15y ago
Well of course IQ isn't set in stone, IQ is based on the results of a test that babies can't take. QED.
- technomancy 15y ago
  Honest question: do people actually believe something like that could be hard-coded? It just seems like a horribly depressing worldview to believe that you're stuck with whatever INT points you rolled at the start... not even to mention being trivially disprovable.
  - gabyar 15y ago
    Just like all things, both nature and nurture are strong factors. Certainly genetics play a factor in IQ, just as they do with other personality traits such as extroversion, or physical traits, such as height. Set in stone would be a huge exaggeration of genetic causation, but people will have certain propensities from birth.
  - codexon 15y ago
    I believe it could be hard-coded just like the reason why I am not even 6 feet tall coding away my health while people like Shaq and Yao Ming make millions a year for being 7 feet tall. Depressing? Yes. That's just the way life is. What is even more depressing is that some people think you can will yourself to be smarter, and if you don't, you are just lazy.
    - ern 15y ago
      I agree that there may be a concept of innate intelligence as you describe it. I have no idea if IQ is an effective measure of it. My uninformed lay-person's instinct is that IQ is correlated with intelligence (with this new evidence we can add the proviso: at the time that the test is taken). What this study seems to say is that IQ is more variable over time than first thought. Perhaps the variability over time is itself hard-coded. Regardless of the cause of this variability over time, I do hope that this study leads to more open-mindedness, and less labelling of kids based on early academic performance or single cognitive scores.
  - rhizome 15y ago
    "People" do, yes. I'm not sure which ones or how to characterize them, but I'm sure there are smart people who think so just as much as dumb ones. To a certain degree though, I do think intelligence can be acquired just like skateboarding skills or anything else that can be learned.
  - pjscott 15y ago
    I think there's some semantic confusion here. 1. There are degrees of mutability; "changeable" versus "hard-coded" is a false dichotomy. For instance, I can increase my arithmetic ability with practice, but I'm never going to be able to improve it so much that I can diagonalize huge matrices faster than a computer. 2. Whether or not a belief is depressing has no bearing on whether or not it is true. So I would reframe the question a bit: to what extent can IQ be changed? How reliable are the tests? And if we can improve IQ, what's the best way to do it? For example, childhood malnutrition can lower IQ, so improving childhood nutrition can pay off big. The Flynn effect -- the rise in IQ scores over time -- suggests that there are other things that can raise people's IQ as well, so if we can find and exploit those, and they actually raise intelligence, then that would be great.
tomjen3 15y ago
Why is it that people are so fixated on IQ? We already know that things like whether the child can wait 20 minutes on a marshmallow at age 4 is a better indicator of scholastic success than IQ. I fear people use IQ as an excuse for a (lack of) their success rather than face up to it and improve (or just accept and move on).
- pjscott 15y ago
  Setting aside the possibility that the delayed-marshmallow-gratification thing has been exaggerated by people wanting to downplay IQ, and taking it at face value: the fact that IQ is not the single most important predictor of scholastic and/or life success does not make it unimportant. It warrants discussion, especially if it can be improved. For example, eliminating childhood malnutrition can improve IQ significantly across whole populations. Isn't that something to be excited about?
  - cema 15y ago
    eliminating childhood malnutrition can improve IQ significantly I suspect it can improve the marshmallow-related behavior as well. But I could just be excited about the elimination of malnutrition.
- hcayce 15y ago
  "Why is it that people are so fixated on IQ?" I suspect that people who ask about IQs say more about themselves than an IQ number says about any particular individual.
- tassl 15y ago
  Humans love to classify and compare. Most of us compete to demonstrate we are better and the intelligence is not different. Having a way to measure this human parameter precisely is a normal consequence. Plus, from a more useful perspective, we need to have some way of measure a parameter if we want to study it. If we were trying to compare the results of two different strategies to improve the intelligence, we would need a precise method to measure the intelligence of every individual.
- 15y ago
rflrob 15y ago
Any idea how reliable a single IQ score is? If you repeat the test a week or a month later, too soon for changes to reflect a significant change in cognitive abilities, but far enough away to get rid of effects like a poor night's sleep, stress from school or relationships, &c., by how much is the score expected to vary?
- vacri 15y ago
  A proper IQ test done under the same conditions (well rested, etc) will give the same results. It's vulnerable to poor conditions - if you're not well rested, you're not going to do as well as you could otherwise.
  - hugh3 15y ago
    In my childhood I did enough IQ tests [1] to be able to say "Oh, it's one of this class of problems again". I assume that people taking repeated IQ tests get better at them, because there's a limited selection of problem types. [1] Only three or four. I'm sure there are lots of kids out there getting far more over-tested than I.
ellyagg 15y ago
Suggesting that IQ is not set in stone also implies that IQ exists. That they don't claim otherwise, and in fact show structural brain changes in accordance with the measured changes, should be well noted by folks who make a habit of discounting it. It should also be noted that IQ was already thought to be malleable into the teens, so I'm not sure why the researchers were so surprised.
- tomlin 15y ago
  It's not that people deny it exists, or discount it all together - it's just a terrible indicator or measurement of one's capabilities. Measurements should be accountable. A few cups of coffee or a bad sleep shouldn't matter if IQ is as reliable as some like to believe. Since it is used to judge one's abilities, it's hardly fair to use it as a practical measurement, just as BMI is impractical to use for judging a body builder's fat percentage. Anecdotally, medication which I take for ADHD/PI doesn't permanently alter my brain's chemistry, yet my IQ takes a noticeable dive without it.
  - alphamale3000 15y ago
    Nonsense. Of course bad sleep will affect your IQ, and it doesn't make it less reliable. Why? You brain is less reliable when you had bad sleep, and IQ is a measurement of its peak performance. If you're not at peak performance any given day, your results will show.
    - tomlin 15y ago
      Sure, but what is the upper limit for peak performance for each individual? If you can't use IQ to compare to other people's IQ (because of innumerable variations imposing on peak performance) and you can't use it to compare to your own potential peak performance (because you don't know if you've attained it yet), then how or why is IQ relevant at all? No one who does well on an IQ test likes to be told an IQ test means very little, keeping in mind that high IQ doesn't determine your success, or guarantee you any specific lifestyle. IQ is more of a horoscope than it is a method of science.
Homunculiheaded 15y ago
I love when people ask "what does your IQ score measure". The only thing it can possibly measure is your ability to perform an IQ test. Now you can ask the question "What does your IQ score strongly correlate with", but I'm pretty sure as it stands 'intelligence' is not well defined enough assign it a quantitative value (or even know if one can be defined). I used to hate standardized tests (and still somewhat do in principle) but when you can show that a test score correlates to performance it does make sense to assist in making decision when there are very large sets of data to process (like college applications). It turns out that SATs do correlate somewhat to freshman year performance. It doesn't really matter if it's for the right reason, if you have thousands of similar applicants it makes sense to use that data point if there are no other options. This is the logic of machine learning too: I don't really care why 2 variables correlate, if they do it can help me make decisions. The issue for me is that I have yet to see anything interesting about what IQ really correlates to. Pretending it is a test that measures intelligence is completely asinine if you take 2 minutes to think about what that claim means.
- jpulgarin 15y ago
  Correlates somewhat to academic performance, lifetime earning, SAT scores etc...
- bad_user 15y ago
  I think it is generally understood by psychologists, sociologists and statisticians that intelligence is not something that you can "measure". Nobody in the know even pretends that. What happens is that people would rather put faith in the correlation between IQ scores and intelligence, rather than nothing at all. It's annoying as hell as IMHO a +/- 15 points doesn't mean anything, but that doesn't stop people making decisions based on that. On the other hand you can clearly say that somebody with an IQ of 240 is gifted or that somebody with an IQ of 60 is challenged. The problem with SAT scores is that people doing well on it are the people fresh out of high-school. You cannot give a SAT test to somebody that's been 10 years out of high-school or to a 10 year old.
  - deleted 15y ago
    [deleted]
deleted 15y ago
[deleted]
Tycho 15y ago
How many other people here have avoided taking an IQ test there entire life thus far?
winestock 15y ago
The following two paragraphs are from the article: "Price and her colleagues used brain scans to confirm that these big fluctuations in performance were not random — or just a fluke. They evaluated the structure of the teens' brain in the early teen years and again in the late teenage years. "We were able to see that the degree to which their IQ had changed was proportional to the degree to which different parts of their brain had changed," explains Price. For instance, an increase in verbal IQ score correlated with a structural change in the left motor cortex of the brain that is activated when we speak." So, if there were structural changes in the brain that correlated with change in IQ score, then IQ likely tells us something other than "this person does this well or badly at IQ tests." Many people are very skeptical about IQ tests. As depressing as it is, the basic science behind psychometrics has been mostly stable for decades. Look up the work of Linda Gottfredson (sp?). As for this particular study, psychometricians already knew that generalized intelligence (the so-called g-factor) crystallized in adolescence or early adulthood. The surprising thing about this study is how much change some of the subjects showed. Going from the fiftieth percentile to the ninety-something or, worse, going in reverse, is a big deal. The researchers behind this study should get more funding to continue their work.
gwern 15y ago
Very interesting; for me, the cool thing is not the variations (after all, we have long known from childhood IQ tests that there's a lot of variation along the way to one's adult IQ) but the nailing it down to the structural brain changes as opposed to more transient or environmental stuff like, say, having a bad day or test-retest effects or something.

42 points by llambda 15y ago

ern 15y ago

Link to original study: http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/vaop/ncurrent/full/nature10514.html http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/vaop/ncurrent/full/natu...

llambda 15y ago
Nature is paywalled so only the abstract is viewable for me.
- asolove 15y ago
  "Nature is paywalled" is a sentence I fear I will see again, with a different meaning, at some time in the future.
- afterburner 15y ago
  Great phrase.

rhizome 15y ago

Well of course IQ isn't set in stone, IQ is based on the results of a test that babies can't take. QED.

technomancy 15y ago
Honest question: do people actually believe something like that could be hard-coded? It just seems like a horribly depressing worldview to believe that you're stuck with whatever INT points you rolled at the start... not even to mention being trivially disprovable.
- gabyar 15y ago
  Just like all things, both nature and nurture are strong factors. Certainly genetics play a factor in IQ, just as they do with other personality traits such as extroversion, or physical traits, such as height. Set in stone would be a huge exaggeration of genetic causation, but people will have certain propensities from birth.
- codexon 15y ago
  I believe it could be hard-coded just like the reason why I am not even 6 feet tall coding away my health while people like Shaq and Yao Ming make millions a year for being 7 feet tall. Depressing? Yes. That's just the way life is. What is even more depressing is that some people think you can will yourself to be smarter, and if you don't, you are just lazy.
  - ern 15y ago
    I agree that there may be a concept of innate intelligence as you describe it. I have no idea if IQ is an effective measure of it. My uninformed lay-person's instinct is that IQ is correlated with intelligence (with this new evidence we can add the proviso: at the time that the test is taken). What this study seems to say is that IQ is more variable over time than first thought. Perhaps the variability over time is itself hard-coded. Regardless of the cause of this variability over time, I do hope that this study leads to more open-mindedness, and less labelling of kids based on early academic performance or single cognitive scores.
- rhizome 15y ago
  "People" do, yes. I'm not sure which ones or how to characterize them, but I'm sure there are smart people who think so just as much as dumb ones. To a certain degree though, I do think intelligence can be acquired just like skateboarding skills or anything else that can be learned.
- pjscott 15y ago
  I think there's some semantic confusion here. 1. There are degrees of mutability; "changeable" versus "hard-coded" is a false dichotomy. For instance, I can increase my arithmetic ability with practice, but I'm never going to be able to improve it so much that I can diagonalize huge matrices faster than a computer. 2. Whether or not a belief is depressing has no bearing on whether or not it is true. So I would reframe the question a bit: to what extent can IQ be changed? How reliable are the tests? And if we can improve IQ, what's the best way to do it? For example, childhood malnutrition can lower IQ, so improving childhood nutrition can pay off big. The Flynn effect -- the rise in IQ scores over time -- suggests that there are other things that can raise people's IQ as well, so if we can find and exploit those, and they actually raise intelligence, then that would be great.

tomjen3 15y ago

Why is it that people are so fixated on IQ? We already know that things like whether the child can wait 20 minutes on a marshmallow at age 4 is a better indicator of scholastic success than IQ. I fear people use IQ as an excuse for a (lack of) their success rather than face up to it and improve (or just accept and move on).

pjscott 15y ago
Setting aside the possibility that the delayed-marshmallow-gratification thing has been exaggerated by people wanting to downplay IQ, and taking it at face value: the fact that IQ is not the single most important predictor of scholastic and/or life success does not make it unimportant. It warrants discussion, especially if it can be improved. For example, eliminating childhood malnutrition can improve IQ significantly across whole populations. Isn't that something to be excited about?
- cema 15y ago
  eliminating childhood malnutrition can improve IQ significantly I suspect it can improve the marshmallow-related behavior as well. But I could just be excited about the elimination of malnutrition.
hcayce 15y ago
"Why is it that people are so fixated on IQ?" I suspect that people who ask about IQs say more about themselves than an IQ number says about any particular individual.
tassl 15y ago
Humans love to classify and compare. Most of us compete to demonstrate we are better and the intelligence is not different. Having a way to measure this human parameter precisely is a normal consequence. Plus, from a more useful perspective, we need to have some way of measure a parameter if we want to study it. If we were trying to compare the results of two different strategies to improve the intelligence, we would need a precise method to measure the intelligence of every individual.
15y ago

rflrob 15y ago

Any idea how reliable a single IQ score is? If you repeat the test a week or a month later, too soon for changes to reflect a significant change in cognitive abilities, but far enough away to get rid of effects like a poor night's sleep, stress from school or relationships, &c., by how much is the score expected to vary?

vacri 15y ago
A proper IQ test done under the same conditions (well rested, etc) will give the same results. It's vulnerable to poor conditions - if you're not well rested, you're not going to do as well as you could otherwise.
- hugh3 15y ago
  In my childhood I did enough IQ tests [1] to be able to say "Oh, it's one of this class of problems again". I assume that people taking repeated IQ tests get better at them, because there's a limited selection of problem types. [1] Only three or four. I'm sure there are lots of kids out there getting far more over-tested than I.

ellyagg 15y ago

Suggesting that IQ is not set in stone also implies that IQ exists. That they don't claim otherwise, and in fact show structural brain changes in accordance with the measured changes, should be well noted by folks who make a habit of discounting it. It should also be noted that IQ was already thought to be malleable into the teens, so I'm not sure why the researchers were so surprised.

tomlin 15y ago
It's not that people deny it exists, or discount it all together - it's just a terrible indicator or measurement of one's capabilities. Measurements should be accountable. A few cups of coffee or a bad sleep shouldn't matter if IQ is as reliable as some like to believe. Since it is used to judge one's abilities, it's hardly fair to use it as a practical measurement, just as BMI is impractical to use for judging a body builder's fat percentage. Anecdotally, medication which I take for ADHD/PI doesn't permanently alter my brain's chemistry, yet my IQ takes a noticeable dive without it.
- alphamale3000 15y ago
  Nonsense. Of course bad sleep will affect your IQ, and it doesn't make it less reliable. Why? You brain is less reliable when you had bad sleep, and IQ is a measurement of its peak performance. If you're not at peak performance any given day, your results will show.
  - tomlin 15y ago
    Sure, but what is the upper limit for peak performance for each individual? If you can't use IQ to compare to other people's IQ (because of innumerable variations imposing on peak performance) and you can't use it to compare to your own potential peak performance (because you don't know if you've attained it yet), then how or why is IQ relevant at all? No one who does well on an IQ test likes to be told an IQ test means very little, keeping in mind that high IQ doesn't determine your success, or guarantee you any specific lifestyle. IQ is more of a horoscope than it is a method of science.

Homunculiheaded 15y ago

I love when people ask "what does your IQ score measure". The only thing it can possibly measure is your ability to perform an IQ test. Now you can ask the question "What does your IQ score strongly correlate with", but I'm pretty sure as it stands 'intelligence' is not well defined enough assign it a quantitative value (or even know if one can be defined). I used to hate standardized tests (and still somewhat do in principle) but when you can show that a test score correlates to performance it does make sense to assist in making decision when there are very large sets of data to process (like college applications). It turns out that SATs do correlate somewhat to freshman year performance. It doesn't really matter if it's for the right reason, if you have thousands of similar applicants it makes sense to use that data point if there are no other options. This is the logic of machine learning too: I don't really care why 2 variables correlate, if they do it can help me make decisions. The issue for me is that I have yet to see anything interesting about what IQ really correlates to. Pretending it is a test that measures intelligence is completely asinine if you take 2 minutes to think about what that claim means.

jpulgarin 15y ago
Correlates somewhat to academic performance, lifetime earning, SAT scores etc...
bad_user 15y ago
I think it is generally understood by psychologists, sociologists and statisticians that intelligence is not something that you can "measure". Nobody in the know even pretends that. What happens is that people would rather put faith in the correlation between IQ scores and intelligence, rather than nothing at all. It's annoying as hell as IMHO a +/- 15 points doesn't mean anything, but that doesn't stop people making decisions based on that. On the other hand you can clearly say that somebody with an IQ of 240 is gifted or that somebody with an IQ of 60 is challenged. The problem with SAT scores is that people doing well on it are the people fresh out of high-school. You cannot give a SAT test to somebody that's been 10 years out of high-school or to a 10 year old.
- deleted 15y ago
  [deleted]

deleted 15y ago

[deleted]

Tycho 15y ago

How many other people here have avoided taking an IQ test there entire life thus far?

winestock 15y ago

The following two paragraphs are from the article: "Price and her colleagues used brain scans to confirm that these big fluctuations in performance were not random — or just a fluke. They evaluated the structure of the teens' brain in the early teen years and again in the late teenage years. "We were able to see that the degree to which their IQ had changed was proportional to the degree to which different parts of their brain had changed," explains Price. For instance, an increase in verbal IQ score correlated with a structural change in the left motor cortex of the brain that is activated when we speak." So, if there were structural changes in the brain that correlated with change in IQ score, then IQ likely tells us something other than "this person does this well or badly at IQ tests." Many people are very skeptical about IQ tests. As depressing as it is, the basic science behind psychometrics has been mostly stable for decades. Look up the work of Linda Gottfredson (sp?). As for this particular study, psychometricians already knew that generalized intelligence (the so-called g-factor) crystallized in adolescence or early adulthood. The surprising thing about this study is how much change some of the subjects showed. Going from the fiftieth percentile to the ninety-something or, worse, going in reverse, is a big deal. The researchers behind this study should get more funding to continue their work.

gwern 15y ago

Very interesting; for me, the cool thing is not the variations (after all, we have long known from childhood IQ tests that there's a lot of variation along the way to one's adult IQ) but the nailing it down to the structural brain changes as opposed to more transient or environmental stuff like, say, having a bad day or test-retest effects or something.