Supplemental Material for A Meta-Analysis on the Relation Between Fluid Intelligence and Reading/Mathematics: Effects of Tasks, Age, and Social Economics Status

On a scale from 1 to 10, would you consider anchoring effects to be more or less important than a rating of 9? The seminal studies on anchoring effects are still surrounded by many mysteries regarding the question of how these effects come about. One of the mysteries is the influence of a person’s cognitive ability. Some studies found that cognitive abilities moderated participants’ susceptibility to anchoring, but others did not. We aimed to resolve these inconsistencies by making a distinction between informative and uninformative (e.g., random) anchors. In a preregistered online experiment, we tested the hypothesis that anchoring effects are weaker for people with higher cognitive abilities but that this relation only occurs if the anchors are perceived as random, and it vanishes if they are presented as informative. We found no support for the hypothesis. Results from a meta-analysis of 15 effects across our study and four other studies revealed no overall effect of cognitive ability on the susceptibility to anchoring, g = 0.003, 95% CI [-0.031, 0.037], Ntotal = 1165. Moreover, we observed that 10 items across three typical anchoring tasks had only very low internal consistency (α = .11). Our analysis of additional published and unpublished data confirmed that a person’s susceptibility to anchoring cannot be measured reliably. This explains why previous results on possible moderators of anchoring (e.g., studies on the Big Five or on fluid intelligence) have been highly inconsistent. We suggest that research on anchoring moderators needs to take a step back and develop a reliable measure for the susceptibility to anchoring.

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Working Memory Training in Typically Developing Children: A Multilevel Meta-Analysis

10.31234/osf.io/p3vku ◽

2019 ◽

Author(s):

Giovanni Sala ◽

Fernand Gobet

Keyword(s):

Academic Achievement ◽

Working Memory ◽

Cognitive Skills ◽

Fluid Intelligence ◽

Meta Analysis ◽

Memory Training ◽

Typically Developing ◽

Far Transfer ◽

Training Research ◽

Active Controls

Working memory (WM) training in typically developing (TD) children aims to enhance not only performance in memory tasks but also other domain-general cognitive skills such as fluid intelligence. These benefits are then believed to positively affect academic achievement. Despite the numerous studies carried out, researchers still disagree over the real benefits of WM training. This meta-analysis (m = 41, k = 393, N = 2,375) intended to resolve the discrepancies by focusing on the potential sources of within-study and between-study true heterogeneity. Small to medium effects were observed in memory tasks (i.e., near transfer). The size of these effects was proportional to the similarity between the training task and the outcome measure. By contrast, far-transfer measures of cognitive ability (e.g., intelligence) and academic achievement (mathematics and language ability) were essentially unaffected by the training programs, especially when the studies implemented active controls (g ̅ = 0.001, SE = 0.055, p = .982, τ2 = 0.000). Crucially, all the models exhibited a null or low amount of true heterogeneity, wholly explained by the type of controls (non-active vs. active) and statistical artifacts, in contrast to the claim that this field has produced mixed results. Since the empirical evidence shows an absence of generalized effects and true heterogeneity, we conclude that there is no reason to keep investing resources in WM training research with TD children.

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Improving Fluid Intelligence With Training on Working Memory: A Meta-Analysis

PsycEXTRA Dataset ◽

10.1037/e524912015-029 ◽

2014 ◽

Cited By ~ 1

Author(s):

Jacky Au ◽

Ellen Sheehan ◽

Nancy Tsai ◽

Greg J. Duncan ◽

Martin Buschkuehl ◽

...

Keyword(s):

Working Memory ◽

Fluid Intelligence ◽

Meta Analysis

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Working Memory Training Revisited: A Multi-Level Meta-Analysis of N-back Training Studies

10.31234/osf.io/fvyra ◽

2018 ◽

Author(s):

Anna Soveri ◽

Jan Antfolk ◽

Linda C. Karlsson ◽

Benny Salo ◽

Matti Laine

Keyword(s):

Working Memory ◽

Cognitive Control ◽

Fluid Intelligence ◽

Meta Analysis ◽

Effect Sizes ◽

Substantial Part ◽

Training Dose ◽

Multi Level ◽

Training Studies ◽

Meta Analyses

The efficacy of working memory (WM) training has been a controversial and hotly debated issue during the last years, and despite a large number of training studies and several meta-analyses, the matter has not yet been solved. We conducted a multi-level meta-analysis on the cognitive transfer effects in healthy adults who have been administered WM updating training with n-back tasks, the most common experimental WM training paradigm. Thanks to this methodological approach that has not been employed in previous meta-analyses in this field, we were able to include effect sizes from all relevant tasks used in the original studies. Altogether 203 effect sizes were derived from 33 published randomized controlled trials. In contrast to earlier meta-analyses, we separated task-specific transfer (here untrained n-back tasks) from other WM transfer tasks. Two additional cognitive domains of transfer that we analyzed consisted of fluid intelligence (Gf) and cognitive control tasks. A medium-sized transfer effect was observed to untrained n-back tasks. For other WM tasks, Gf, and cognitive control, the effect sizes were of similar size and very small. Moderator analyses showed no effects of age, training dose, training type (single vs. dual), or WM and Gf transfer task contents (verbal vs. visuospatial). We conclude that a substantial part of transfer following WM updating training with n-back is task-specific and discuss the implications of the results to WM training research.

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Discovering the shared biology of cognitive traits determined by genetic overlap

10.1101/723643 ◽

2019 ◽

Author(s):

JPOFT Guimaraes ◽

J Bralten ◽

CU Greven ◽

B Franke ◽

E Sprooten ◽

...

Keyword(s):

Functional Imaging ◽

Fluid Intelligence ◽

Meta Analysis ◽

Genetic Correlations ◽

Brain Activation ◽

Human Cognition ◽

Card Sorting ◽

Human Connectome Project ◽

Vocabulary Comprehension ◽

Cognitive Traits

AbstractInvestigating the contribution of biology to human cognition has assumed a bottom-up causal cascade where genes influence brain systems that activate, communicate, and ultimately drive behavior. Yet few studies have directly tested whether cognitive traits with overlapping genetic underpinnings also rely on overlapping brain systems. Here, we report a step-wise exploratory analysis of genetic and functional imaging overlaps among cognitive traits. We used twin-based genetic analyses in the human connectome project (HCP) dataset (N=486), in which we quantified the heritability of measures of cognitive functions, and tested whether they were driven by common genetic factors using pairwise genetic correlations. Subsequently, we derived activation maps associated with cognitive tasks via functional imaging meta-analysis in BrainMap (N=4484), and tested whether cognitive traits that shared genetic variation also exhibited overlapping brain activation. Our genetic analysis determined that six cognitive measures (card sorting, no-go continuous performance, fluid intelligence, processing speed, reading decoding and vocabulary comprehension) were heritable (0.3<h2<0.5), and genetically correlated with at least one other heritable cognitive measure (0.2<ρg<0.35). The meta-analysis showed that two genetically-correlated traits, card sorting and fluid intelligence (ρg=0.24), also had a significant brain activation overlap (ρperm=0.29). These findings indicate that fluid intelligence and executive functioning rely on overlapping biological features, both at the neural systems level and at the molecular level. The cross-disciplinary approach we introduce provides a concrete framework for data-driven quantification of biological convergence between genetics, brain function, and behavior in health and disease.

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Education and Age-related Decline in Cognitive Performance: Systematic Review and Meta-analysis of Longitudinal Cohort Studies

10.31219/osf.io/4mf9z ◽

2019 ◽

Author(s):

Dominika Seblova ◽

Rasmus Berggren ◽

Martin Lövdén

Keyword(s):

Systematic Review ◽

General Population ◽

Episodic Memory ◽

Educational Attainment ◽

Cognitive Performance ◽

Cognitive Aging ◽

Protective Factor ◽

Fluid Intelligence ◽

Meta Analysis ◽

Sensitivity Analyses

Central theories of cognitive aging propose that education is an important protective factor for decline in cognitive performance in older age. We conducted a systematic review and meta-analysis of reported estimates of an association between educational attainment and change in performance in six cognitive domains (episodic memory, processing speed, verbal fluency, crystallized intelligence, fluid intelligence, and global ability) in the general population of older individuals. The systematic search (28th of September, 2018) identified 83 eligible articles. The episodic memory domain had the highest number of estimates (37 estimates from 17 articles, n=109,281) included in the meta-analysis. The fewest estimates (5 estimates from 5 articles, n=5,263) were included for fluid intelligence. Pooled mean estimates from an inverse-variance weighted random effects analysis were not statistically significant and indicated that any association between education and change in cognitive performance is likely to be of a negligible magnitude. Sensitivity analyses did not substantially alter these results. However, heterogeneity was substantial, and remained largely unexplained by mean age, mean educational attainment, maximum follow-up period, and publication year. Overall education is an important factor in aging due to its robust association with level of performance. However, we conclude that the current base of empirical evidence is not revealing a consistent and substantial association between educational attainment and changes in cognitive performance in the general population. Theories of cognitive aging must be updated to incorporate this pattern of findings.

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