The heritability of general cognitive ability increases linearly from childhood to young adulthood

By C. Haworth, M. Wright, M. Luciano, Nicholas G. Martin, E. D. Geus, C. V. Beijsterveldt, M. Bartels, Danielle Posthuma, Dorret I. Boomsma, O. Davis and 14 more. Molecular Psychiatry, 2009

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Although common sense suggests that environmental influences increasingly account for individual differences in behavior as experiences accumulate during the course of life, this hypothesis has not previously been tested, in part because of the large sample sizes needed for an adequately powered analysis. Here we show for general cognitive ability that, to the contrary, genetic influence increases with age. The heritability of general cognitive ability increases significantly and linearly from 41% in childhood (9 years) to 55% in adolescence (12 years) and to 66% in young adulthood (17 years) in a sample of 11 000 pairs of twins from four countries, a larger sample than all previous studies combined. In addition to its far-reaching implications for neuroscience and molecular genetics, this finding suggests new ways of thinking about the interface between nature and nurture during the school years. Why, despite life's ‘slings and arrows of outrageous fortune’, do genetically driven differences increasingly account for differences in general cognitive ability? We suggest that the answer lies with genotype–environment correlation: as children grow up, they increasingly select, modify and even create their own experiences in part based on their genetic propensities.

Subfields: Experimental and Cognitive Psychology, Genetics

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/36348eda616edee1c0e629dc252b1981d65efbf0

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Citations in the corpus

The Relationship between N-Back Performance and Matrix Reasoning--Implications for Training and Transfer. (2010, background): “…National Taiwan Normal University, Taipei, Taiwan a r t i c l e i n f o ☆ This work was supported by a grant of The Advancing Safe Transportation throughout the Lifespa G-0058) to MB, a fellowship from the Swiss Nationa (PA001-117473) to SMJ, and a grant from the Office o (N00014-09-0213).”
Analysis of shared heritability in common disorders of the brain (2018, positive): “01)], yielded estimates that were more consistent with previous estimates of the heritability of intelligence (29, 30), suggesting that the cognitive measures may be less prone to pheno– typic measurement error and/or have a higher heritability overall than the personality measures.”
Brain-Derived Neurotrophic Factor: A Key Molecule for Memory in the Healthy and the Pathological Brain (2019, background): “Genetic variance could explain these individual differences in cognitive capacity, especially since heritability of cognitive function increases over the lifespan as brain resources decrease (Haworth et al., 2010), and can account for as much as one third of the variance in cognitive decline (Finkel”
The Neuroscience of Intelligence (2016, background): “The factor is the age when twins are tested (Haworth et al., 2010; McGue et al., 1993).”
Meta-analysis of twin studies highlights the importance of genetic variation in primary school educational achievement (2015, background): “A major role for genetic effects on general cognitive ability has already been well recognized [7] and is characterized by an increase during childhood [8,9].”
Education and Cognitive Functioning Across the Life Span (2020, background): “Indeed, there is consistent evidence of increasing heritability of cognitive abilities during development, with meta-analyses indicating increases from approximately 10% in infancy to approximately 70% by late adolescence (Briley & Tucker-Drob, 2013; Haworth et al., 2010).”
Frequency-specific maturation of cortical organization and social-cognitive links from childhood to adolescence (2025, unknown): “Childhood and adolescence show wide variability in intelligence and sensitivity to the social environment (Haworth et al., 2010; Venticinque et al., 2024), and developmental changes in neural oscillations may contribute to these differences (Cellier et al., 2021; Easson & McIntosh, 2019; Rier et…”