1 Max Planck UCL Centre for Computational Psychiatry and Ageing Research, London, England, and Berlin, Germany.
2 MRC Cognition and Brain Sciences Unit, University of Cambridge.
Psychol Sci. 2017 Oct;28(10):1419-1431. doi: 10.1177/0956797617710785. Epub 2017 Aug 8.
One of the most replicable findings in psychology is the positive manifold: the observation that individual differences in cognitive abilities are universally positively correlated. Investigating the developmental origin of the positive manifold is crucial to understanding it. In a large longitudinal cohort of adolescents and young adults ( N = 785; n = 566 across two waves, mean interval between waves = 1.48 years; age range = 14-25 years), we examined developmental changes in two core cognitive domains, fluid reasoning and vocabulary. We used bivariate latent change score models to compare three leading accounts of cognitive development: g-factor theory, investment theory, and mutualism. We showed that a mutualism model, which proposes that basic cognitive abilities directly and positively interact during development, provides the best account of developmental changes. We found that individuals with higher scores in vocabulary showed greater gains in matrix reasoning and vice versa. These dynamic coupling pathways are not predicted by other accounts and provide a novel mechanistic window into cognitive development.
即观察到认知能力的个体差异普遍呈正相关。研究积极分布的发展起源对于理解它至关重要。在一项对青少年和年轻人的大型纵向队列研究中（N=785；在两个波次中 n=566，波次之间的平均间隔为 1.48 年；年龄范围为 14-25 岁），我们考察了两个核心认知领域——流体推理和词汇的发展变化。我们使用双变量潜在变化分数模型比较了三种主要的认知发展理论：g 因素理论、投资理论和互惠主义。我们表明，提出在发展过程中基本认知能力直接且积极相互作用的互惠主义模型为发展变化提供了最佳解释。我们发现，词汇得分较高的个体在矩阵推理方面的进步更大，反之亦然。这些动态耦合途径无法被其他理论解释，为认知发展提供了一个新的机械性窗口。
