Smart People
Why are smart people curious? Fluid intelligence, openness to experience, and interest
Paul Silvia & Camilla Sanders
Learning and Individual Differences, forthcoming
Abstract:
The experience of interest is central to intrinsic motivation for learning, so it is important to understand the nature of interest and its sources. Individual differences in fluid intelligence (Gf) predict finding things more interesting, but it is possible that this effect is merely due to the overlap of Gf with openness to experience, a strong predictor of interest across many domains. The present research measured Gf, the Big Five traits, and the interestingness of contemporary poems and visual art. Latent variable models found that Gf predicted interest in both poems and pictures, even when openness and gender were included as predictors. Moreover, Gf and openness did not interact, indicating main effects rather than joint effects. The relationship between Gf and interest thus appears robust.
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Therese Macan, Janet Gibson & Jennifer Cunningham
Personality and Individual Differences, forthcoming
Abstract:
Time management and memory processes include a variety of common concepts and goals, namely to monitor the time it takes to complete current tasks and remember later to complete intended activities. In the present study, we correlated scales that measure components of time management with those that measure prospective and retrospective memory. As expected, significant correlations indicate that people who report that they manage their time well report successful prospective and retrospective memory. Most importantly, those who engage in setting goals and priorities and have a preference for organization reported better memory than those who do not. Implications for research in time management and prospective memory are discussed.
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Charlie Reeve & Debra Basalik
Intelligence, forthcoming
Abstract:
This study examined the degree to which differences in average IQ across the 50 states was associated with differences in health statistics independent of differences in wealth, health care expenditures and racial composition. Results show that even after controlling for differences in state wealth and health care expenditures, average IQ had sizeable positive associations with a wide range of positive health indicators, and sizeable negative associations with a wide range of state health problems. Consistent with Gottfredson's (2004) [Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 86, 174-199.] hypotheses, some of the apparent associations between racial composition and health outcomes were accounted for by IQ differences. When IQ was controlled, some of the relationships between racial composition and health outcomes reversed signs suggesting an advantage for minorities. However, even after controlling for average IQ and wealth factors, racial composition continued to be associated with some of the health statistics examined. Overall, the results partially confirmed that g does account for a significant portion of the variance many state health outcomes, but socio-economic factors and racial composition appear to also have important relations with some specific health outcomes.
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Anchoring and cognitive ability
Oscar Bergman, Tore Ellingsen, Magnus Johannesson & Cicek Svensson
Economics Letters, forthcoming
Abstract:
We find that the actual willingness to pay for various consumer goods can be manipulated by an uninformative anchor, replicating Ariely et al (2003). We furthermore demonstrate that the anchoring effect decreases but does not vanish with higher cognitive ability.
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Eclectic lefty-hand: Conjectures on Jimi Hendrix, handedness, and Electric Ladyland
Stephen Christman
Laterality: Asymmetries of Body, Brain and Cognition, January 2010, Pages 253-269
Abstract:
An analysis of Jimi Hendrix's guitar playing and song writing is presented in light of the effects of his mixed-right-handedness on motoric and conceptual processing. It is argued that (i) his mixed-handedness allowed him greater integration of the roles of his left and right hands in guitar playing and (ii) his right-handedness conferred specific benefits in playing a left-handed guitar. In terms of his song writing, the greater interhemispheric interaction (and consequent greater access to right hemisphere processing) associated with mixed-handedness is argued to characterise aspects of his lyrics and vocal delivery.
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Genetic Variation in Financial Decision Making
David Cesarini, Magnus Johannesson, Paul Lichtenstein, Örjan Sandewall & Björn Wallace
Journal of Finance, forthcoming
Abstract:
Individuals differ in how they compose their investment portfolios, yet empirical models of portfolio risk typically only account for a small portion of the cross-sectional variance. This paper asks if genetic variation can explain some of these individual differences. Following a major pension reform Swedish adults had to compose a port- folio from a large menu of funds. We match data on these investment decisions with the Swedish Twin Registry and find that approximately 25% of individual variation in portfolio risk is due to genetic variation. We also show that these results extend to several other aspects of financial decision-making.
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A bump on a bump? Emerging intuitions concerning the relative difficulty of the sciences
Frank Keil, Kristi Lockhart & Esther Schlegel
Journal of Experimental Psychology: General, February 2010, Pages 1-15
Abstract:
In 4 studies, the authors examined how intuitions about the relative difficulties of the sciences develop. In Study 1, familiar everyday phenomena in physics, chemistry, biology, psychology, and economics were pretested in adults, so as to be equally difficult to explain. When participants in kindergarten, Grades 2, 4, 6, and 8, and college were asked to rate the difficulty of understanding these phenomena, children revealed a strong bias to see natural science phenomena as more difficult than those in psychology. The perceived relative difficulty of economics dropped dramatically in late childhood. In Study 2, children saw neuroscience phenomena as much more difficult than cognitive psychology phenomena, which were seen as more difficult than social psychology phenomena, even though all phenomena were again equated for difficulty in adults. In Study 3, we explored the basis for these results in intuitions about common knowledge and firsthand experience. Study 4 showed that the intuitions about the differences between the disciplines were based on intuitions about difficulty of understanding and not on the basis of more general intuitions about the feasibility or truth of the phenomena in question. Taken together, in the studies, the authors find an early emerging basis for judgments that some sciences are intrinsically more difficult than others, a bias that may persevere in adults in subtler forms in such settings as the courtroom.
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Do we follow others when we should? A simple test of rational expectations
Georg Weizsäcker
American Economic Review, forthcoming
Abstract:
The paper presents a new meta data set covering 13 experiments on the social learning games by Bikhchandani, Hirshleifer, and Welch (1992). The large amount of data makes it possible to estimate the empirically optimal action for a large variety of decision situations and ask about the economic significance of suboptimal play. For example, one can ask how much of the possible payoffs the players earn in situations where it is empirically optimal that they follow others and contradict their own information. The answer is 53% on average across all experiments ---only slightly more than what they would earn by choosing at random. The players' own information carries much more weight in the choices than the information conveyed by other players' choices: the average player contradicts her own signal only if the empirical odds ratio of the own signal being wrong, conditional on all available information, is larger than 2:1, rather than 1:1 as would be implied by rational expectations. A regression analysis formulates a straightforward test of rational expectations, which rejects, and confirms that the reluctance to follow others generates a large part of the observed variance in payoffs, adding to the variance that is due to situational differences.
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Exploring the relationship between fetal heart rate and cognition
Barbara Kisilevsky & Sylvia Hains
Infant and Child Development, January/February 2010, Pages 60-75
Abstract:
A relationship between fetal heart rate (HR) and cognition is explored within the context of infant, child and adult studies where the association is well established. Lack of direct access to the fetus and maturational changes limit research paradigms and response measures for fetal studies. Nevertheless, neural regulation of HR shows a number of parallels with adult regulation, albeit immature. Discrimination, habituation and learning of auditory stimuli provide evidence of a relationship between fetal HR and cognition. Fetuses discriminate speech sounds, demonstrating a HR decrease to a stimulus change, indicating attention/orienting. They show habituation, a novelty response and dishabituation of a HR response to complex sounds and faster habituation over intervals of 10 min and 24 h, indicating memory. Differential HR response to the familiar mother's versus a novel stranger's voice and to a familiar versus novel passage demonstrate learning, suggesting that neural networks sensitive to the properties of ubiquitous environmental sounds are being formed before birth.
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Silvia Ortiz-Mantilla, Myong-sun Choe, Judy Flax, Ellen Grant & April Benasich
NeuroImage, 1 February 2010, Pages 2791-2799
Abstract:
Recently, structural MRI studies in children have been used to examine relations between brain volume and behavioral measures. However, most of these studies have been done in children older than 2 years of age. Obtaining volumetric measures in infants is considerably more difficult, as structures are less well defined and largely unmyelinated, making segmentation challenging. Moreover, it is still unclear whether individual anatomic variation across development, in healthy, normally developing infants, is reflected in the configuration and function of the mature brain and, as importantly, whether variation in infant brain structure might be related to later cognitive and linguistic abilities. In this longitudinal study, using T1 structural MRI, we identified links between amygdala volume in normally developing, naturally sleeping, 6-month infants and their subsequent language abilities at 2, 3 and 4 years. The images were processed and manually segmented using Cardviews to extract volumetric measures. Intra-rater reliability for repeated segmentation was 87.73% of common voxel agreement. Standardized language assessments were administered at 6 and 12 months and at 2, 3 and 4 years. Significant and consistent correlations were found between amygdala size and language abilities. Children with larger right amygdalae at 6 months had lower scores on expressive and receptive language measures at 2, 3, and 4 years. Associations between amygdala size and language outcomes have been reported in children with autism. The findings presented here extend this association to normally developing children, supporting the idea that the amygdalae might play an important but as yet unspecified role in mediating language acquisition.