Can Intelligence be improved ? Can IQ be increased ?

 In the time since Alfred Binet designed the first IQ test in 1905, among experts in cognitive psychology, IQ has become a concept that often occurs even in our daily lives in many elements of popular culture.

On the one hand, experts in the field of intelligence research have discussed the effects of social factors such as IQ inheritance and socioeconomic status; people who are not familiar with the subject have become familiar with the subject through works such as Gattaca and Harrison Bergeron, which offer contrasting perspectives on IQ. The storm of controversy created by The Bell Curve book, which turns 27 in 2021, continues with the same vigour today. In 1996, the American Psychological Association (APA) published a report addressing the controversy that began with the publication of the book The Bell Curve, and they conducted a comprehensive review of IQ measurement methods, various parameters affecting this score, and changes in IQ over time.[1] the purpose of this article is to convey whether IQ can be improved by effort and by what methods it can be done, rather than discussions on this issue.

Most of us, through ads or various social media shares in our daily lives, say, "test your IQ!"or" increase your IQ by solving this puzzle!"we're being held to headline bombardments like. Many of us will know that such titles are an attempt to make hearsay information of a scientific nature, but still a person cannot ask: is IQ, or rather, "intelligence" in general, an enhancable trait? For example, we know that we can't increase our height by playing basketball or shorten our height by lifting weightlifting. So can solving a puzzle, making our children listen to classical music (for example, Mozart) at an early age, doing "brain exercises", studying IQ tests really change intelligence and the IQ values that measure it ?

How is IQ measured (safely) ?

Designing and implementing IQ tests is a complex psychometric process that requires expertise. Professional cognitive psychologists, designed by located between the main tests, Woodcock-Johnson, WAIS, WISC, and Raven's Standard Progressive Matrices tests, such as a group of people that have been deemed to represent primarily the population scores are normalized, and age is held constant, the average IQ score of 100 is considered. At this point, Psychometrics based the scores on the Gaussian normal distribution model and set the standard deviation value to 15 IQ points. After that, people who are tested under the supervision of a psychologist for a certain period of time try to give the most accurate answers in accordance with the instructions given to them. Finally, the psychologist evaluates the answers obtained, corrects them, taking into account general and special factors, and reports the score of the tester as an IQ score.

It is clear that such extensive testing has not been imitated by cheap Facebook pages. These tests or exercises market the claim that any consumption of mental effort can increase IQ. This is not true. A test that you encounter on social media can measure your certain skills (such as puzzle solving, pattern recognition, or math), but based on this, it cannot give you a general IQ score; the score it gives has no validity. As can be seen from the Cambridge Analytica scandal, the overall purpose of such games is advertising marketing and collecting data from you.But in order to see this, we need to understand how the reliability of tests that will be applied on people in general, not just IQ tests, is determined.

The reliability of professional tests that will serve as critical tests, such as IQ tests, is determined by three components:

• Internal validity, cause-and-effect relations of the examined phenomenon within itself;
• External validity, case studied and cause-and-effect patterns of other cases and events;
• The validity of the structure also indicates the accuracy that a particular observation actually examines the structure that is claimed to have been examined.

In the context of IQ tests, such validity criteria are also used to assess the reliability of an IQ test.

Although IQ tests indicate a numerically expressed structure that does not need to be defined, over the past thirty years, neuroscientists have shown that IQ is closely related to the physiological and anatomical structure of the brain.

In terms of internal validity, IQ tests are tests of different cognitive abilities of the sub-tests of a positive correlation, in scientific terms, "positive manifold" and the sub-tests of different degrees "g-loaded" to be (i.e. Spearman's general intelligence factor, g, with correlations to be different), such as observations are available.

 

What makes the field of Intelligence Research controversial with the concept of IQ is the literature on the external validity of IQ scores. In terms of external validity, IQ is positively related to socioeconomic status, general health status, educational attainment, income, lifetime, work performance, and even life satisfaction; it is negatively related to having children out of wedlock, unemployment, school dropout, crime rate, and even smoking.

 

But to date, many of these associations have been challenged, the direction of causality between IQ and these issues and the generalizability of the findings have been criticized, and very extensive discussions have been conducted on the subject (the APA report reflects this beautifully). Similarly, IQ research's arguments for Intergroup differences are highly controversial.As we have said, We will go into all of these discussions here(e); you can read more about it in the resources section.

Failed projects to increase IQ

The claim that IQ scores can be improved through various interventions is an extremely hot topic, which has been debated for a long time. So much so that protests began for the dismissal of Arthur Jensen, who in a 1969 article suggested that a program focused on increasing IQ scores had failed; Jensen had to travel around campus accompanied by police bodyguards. So, what is the project that Jensen is talking about focused on increasing IQ, and has it really failed?

Harvard Educational Review, 1969 Jensen from White Americans and African-Americans (Black Americans) 15 point difference in IQ between the training program in order to put into effect to help eliminate the "head start"to assess the progress of and was asked to write an article about how successful it is. After examining the course, Jensen wrote that" auxiliary training was tried "but" failed".Jensen's "Head Start" program against the data it offers, mostly of educational achievement and academic achievement variables such as intelligence, IQ were causally related, i.e., showed that the heritability of intelligence around 80% because it is" no you can't achieve great success suggested that helper training program (however, the rate of genetic heritability of IQ is also quite controversial, and so far the work, Results ranging from around 50% to around 80% were obtained). The APA's 1996 report on intelligence and IQ states that:

 

"Children who participate in head Start and similar programs are exposed to 1-2 years of many school-related materials and experiences. During this program, children's test scores often increase, but these gains disappear over time. Towards the end of primary education, no noticeable IQ difference is observed between the children who participate in these programs and the control groups who do not participate. However, there may be some other differences between these guys: later studies, pre-school special education programs to be written in fewer participants in the program they had them and they were back less overlapping with his grades than students in the control group showed that the higher the probability of high school graduation.

More comprehensive interventions are expected to create larger and longer effective differences, but few of these programs have been systematically evaluated. In one of the more successful programs, the Carolina Abecedarian Project, a group of children were provided with a richer environment from early infancy to preschool age, and proper control groups were used.[35] the test scores of children in the enriched group were higher than the control group even when they were 2 years old, and although 7 years after the intervention ended, the difference in points remained around 5 by the time they reached the age of 12. More importantly, the enriched group showed higher success in academic achievement than the control group."

 

You only fool yourself by studying IQ tests in advance, cheating during the exam, or getting help! The validity of the score you receive in the procedure drops severely, and the score you receive becomes meaningless.

Now, let's take a little closer look at these types of pre-school education interventions.

Pre-School Education Interventions

Milwaukee Project

A total of 48 African-American children were selected for the Milwaukee project in 1966. Half of them were assigned to the control group and received no auxiliary early education, while the other half were sent to kindergartens and subjected to a fairly intensive intervention program. During the first 18 months, weekly 3-5-hour visits were organized to the homes of the children in the experimental group, and their mothers were trained in many subjects such as financial management, hygiene, nutrition, and housework skills. After that, children regularly interacted with kindergarten teachers, first one-on-one and then three-on-one towards the end. During this program, children were given "all didactic stimulation recommended by child development experts", while children in the control group did not have any of these experiences.

When the children reached the age of 6, there was a development that gave a manifestation of success for the researchers, and when the children were tested with IQ tests, the IQ of the experimental group was approximately 21-32 points higher than that of the control group. But the effect, which would later be called the "damping effect", has shown itself over the years, with the IQ difference between the two groups falling to 18 points by the age of 10 and to 10 points by the age of 14. It would be a logical inference to predict that the IQ difference between the two groups will narrow further when they become adults, as the heritability of IQ reaches its original capacity between the ages of 18 and 20, Wilson said.[36] but furthermore, the IQ difference between the two groups had a negative correlation with the G-factor, which was the true representative of intelligence even at the age of 14, indicating that the IQ difference had no practical value. The fact that the experimental group failed academically than expected was also an indicator of this.

But it is also possible to understand how controversial such projects are: as a result of the fact that Rick Heber, the project's Executive, obtained self-interest using federal funds, he was fired from the University of Wisconsin-Madison some time after this study, and as a result of an investigation, he was tried and imprisoned for fraud. Not only Heber, but 2 other colleagues involved in the project were tried and found guilty of the same crime. Accordingly, the results of the Milwaukee project were not published in any peer-reviewed academic journal, and Heber declined requests for raw data and technical details requested from him. Accordingly, the issues of whether Heber did the work from the very beginning, if he did it, and how he did it, were discussed. Despite this, many psychology textbooks contain the results of this research.

Carolina Abecedarian Project

6 years after the Milwaukee project, the Carolina Abecedarian Project, which we mentioned above, was started. In this study, children in the experimental group (most of whom are African-American) were subjected to a daily 8-hour educational program in child care centers 5 days a week from an average age of 4.4 months to the age of 5. In addition, regular visits to the families of children in the experimental group have been provided with training on how they can help their children in their academic lives.

As with the Milwaukee project, although IQ differences showed a damping effect over time, some increase in educational attainment was indeed observed in the experimental group for this study. In this study:

• When children turn 21, The intervened group:
  
• Reading achievement scores are 1.8 percentage points higher,
  
• Math achievement scores are 1.3 points higher,
  
• Full scale IQ scores are 4.4 points, oral IQ scores are 4.2 points higher;
  
• Half a year more schools,
  
• School enrolment rates are remarkably high (42% vs. 20 %),
  
• School attendance rates are remarkably high (36% vs. 14 %),
  
• Rates of dealing with talent-demanding jobs are remarkably high (47% vs. 27 %),
  
• Rates of having children in their 10s are remarkably low (26% versus 45%),
  
• Lower criminal activity;
  
• When the children turn 30, The intervened group:
  
• Graduation rates from a 4-year university are 4 times higher (23% vs. 6 %),
  
• Rates of regular job ownership over the past 2 years have been remarkably high (74% vs. 53 %),
  
• Rates of receiving state aid in the last 7 years have been 5 times lower (4% vs. 20%),
  
• Their age of parenthood has been shown to be delayed by 2 years.

In addition, this intensive intervention program was shown to be positively related, albeit weak, to the g-factor. It is believed that the reason for these results, which do not coincide with the Head Start program, may be that the Abecedarian program has made a much more comprehensive intervention in children. But due to the nature of these studies, this positive relationship is also interpreted by some researchers as an erroneous inference.

Perry Kindergarten Project (HighScope)

Another example is the Perry kindergarten project. As mentioned in the other two studies, which started in 1962 in this study, damping effect, although this effect showed itself in a more comprehensive manner, the IQ of the experimental group and the control group, although both groups was respectively 95 and 83 85 IQ during a specific period of time.But a review by Nobel Laureate James Heckman found that the intervened group had a much higher rate of high school graduation, income, and university education.; crime rates were much lower.In addition, investigations have shown that the children of the intervened children also benefit from this intervention, that the quality of the teachers involved in the intervention plays a decisive role in the results, that such interventions balance their own costs and make society profit by reducing crime rates.

 

As can be seen, although pre-school program interventions do not seem to have much effect on IQ scores, they contribute to children in other ways, helping them become more useful and productive people in society. This suggests that social performance is not just associated with IQ, but that the opportunities offered can directly influence the results achieved.

Making Children Listen To Classical Music...

Getting rid of the facts revealed by scientific research today, one of the cognitive myths that continues among the public is that listening to classical music increases the IQ of children, especially at an early age.

 

The origin of this claim lies in a study published in 1993, which claimed that listening to Mozart for a short period of 10 minutes showed increased scores obtained in spatial reasoning tests. Although this 8 IQ score finding was enthusiastically received by the media, Rauscher and his colleagues were met with skepticism by intelligence researchers who were experts in their field. Such an increase was unlikely, and it took 6 years to identify methodological and theoretical errors in the study. Finally, Christopher Chabris achieved this by evaluating Rauscher's work in 1999.

Listening to the works of artists whose compositions, such as Mozart, have reached a legendary position, does not increase your happiness, but does not increase your intelligence!

Despite this, this popular myth survived for 17 years - until in 2010 Jakob Pietschnig dealt a fatal blow to the "Mozart-Schmozart" effect... Abstract reasoning tests different coincide with each other, count, singular cognitive ability (abstract reasoning) fsiq (all holistic cognitive abilities IQ points), to translate many of the theoretical and methodological error, the sample size, the original study by 36 people, the credibility is severely damaged.

Similarly, it is widely claimed that studying music is also associated with a high IQ.But a study of 10,500 twins showed that music education had no effect on IQ, while correlations that previous studies had identified between music and IQ were due to genetic factors. Similarly, a 2017 meta-analysis found that while music education is not a good indicator of children and young people'S IQ level, academic achievement or cognitive ability, previous studies may have been influenced by tertiary factors.

Memory and intelligence exercises

The study, which covered the 2008 issue of PNAS, claimed that fluent intelligence can be increased far-reaching, which in turn can be accomplished with simple memory exercises. Because fluent intelligence has a significant positive correlation with g-factor, it found its place in the media, although this claim was met with immediate skepticism, leading some researchers to oppose g-factor and claim that IQ is not hereditary.

In 2009, David E. Moody has published an article criticizing this research and demonstrating its errors. The BOMAT test, used to measure fluid intelligence, has an increasingly difficult format, starting with easy questions, and the testanan is given exactly 45 minutes to complete the test. But in this study, those who were tested were only recognized for 10 minutes, which led them to solve only some of the easy questions within the recognized time, not to reach questions that were more G-charged and cognitively difficult. This error in methodology has become even more serious, as the size of the sample is small and limited only to university students. When students were tested with the more comprehensively applicable RAPM test, they showed no increase in fluent intelligence.

Indeed, puzzles, puzzles, games, etc., which allegedly improve intelligence. apps have no noticeable effect on IQ, just making you more successful in that game (some studies show that this effect is a placebo effect).

Computer Games

Another tool that is claimed to increase IQ is computer games. In 2011, Mackey and his colleagues claimed that their IQ increased by 10 percentage points after their children from low-income families practiced computer games. The sample group of 28 students were subjected to a program of one-hour workouts two days a week for eight weeks. When the researchers tested the children's IQ with the nonverbal TONI Test at the end of the program, they recorded an increase of an average of 9.9 points.

Another study in 2017 showed that computer games such as League of Legends and DOTA 2 could be a good proxy test for cognitive performance on a global scale.

However, these studies are not sufficient to claim that computer games increase IQ, and it may not be correct to generalize these results, especially since the sample sizes are small.

Brain Exercise Programs

No practice or program that claims to increase IQ has achieved as much (Bad) fame as brain exercise programs. Brain exercise programs undoubtedly make their customers more efficient in terms of their ability in the tests they offer them - although even these abilities return to their natural point, having a damping effect after the end of the program... In other words, these companies produce a test, then offer some tools that will make you successful in that test, and then claim that your overall intelligence increases because you improve yourself in the test. It's a cheap trick, and it can't be claimed that those tests measure overall intelligence.

 

Such programs need not only to show the capabilities measured by the tests they offer to their customers, but also to show the effect of transferring these exercises between close abilities and modalities. This means that as a result of exercises that fall into the category of verbal intelligence, the user's spatial and Matrix reasoning abilities must also develop.

The cognitive psychological literature on such programs suggests that brain exercises cannot significantly increase IQ.For example, in the United States, Lumos Labs lost a $ 2 million damages lawsuit and was forced to refund 13,000 customers their money after claiming that a brain exercise program called "Lumosity" could improve academic and work performance and stop mental decline in the elderly. Aditi Jhaveri, in 2016:

"If you can't keep anything else in mind, keep this: you should be suspicious of any apps, products and services that claim to be able to increase your memory or mental strength quickly and easily."

Promising Projects To Increase IQ

Given the theories of leading neuroscientists that intelligence is a biological ability that depends on the structure of the brain, the failure of studies that use short-term and only environmental factors has led some researchers to devote their attention to environmental factors that will have a biological impact to increase IQ. Indeed, since most studies indicate that intelligence is a neurological-based biological trait, environmental interventions that can affect the brain's development process have shown no insignificant success.

Affiliate

There are many studies that indicate that children born to low-income families are adopted by families with a higher socioeconomic status as a result of their IQ being higher compared to their biological siblings who are not adopted. For example, in a study in Sweden, double 436-biological and the other adopted siblings were raised by their biological parents of someone between the ages of 18-20 during the compulsory service reviews the cognitive IQ measured with IQ average of 4.41 adopted by parents with higher socioeconomic status it has been observed that the Higher Brothers.

Another study examined the results of the Iowa adoption project and showed that adopted children were more advantageous in terms of social outcomes, such as income, in their later years compared to their non-adopted siblings.[72] but many cognitive psychologists believe that this increase may be due to the fact that the environment offered to adopted children during the development process is more cognitive enriching, rather than educational opportunities.[73] despite this, adoption efforts, They provide the most robust evidence that IQ can be increased, albeit by a small amount, as a result of long-term and an intervention that affects an individual's life both environmentally and biologically.

Since IQ is a fairly high genetic component (and given that this inheritance coefficient in children is generally lower), it is debatable whether the IQ increases in these studies are subject to a damping effect or whether these increases are really G-charged, that is, genuine increases.

Reducing Blood Lead Levels

It has been known for a long time that when lead levels in the blood are above a certain level, it is a factor that damages cognitive functions and can even lead to cognitive disabilities in some cases. Before humans, the cognitive effects of lead levels in the blood in animals were studied, and it was observed that the cognitive abilities of mice with high blood lead levels were dulled. 4 as a result of longitudinal research, lead levels in the blood were also shown to be negative in people's cognitive performance: an increase in lead levels from 10 ug/dl to 20 ug/dl corresponds to a decrease in IQ scores of 2.57.

However, subsequent studies of the cognitive effects of lead exposure are linear if the lead level of 2.4 ug/dL from 10 ug/dL 3.9 corresponds to a loss of IQ points ,while the level of 10 ug/dL 20 ug/dL has shown a loss of IQ points, which corresponds to 1.9. In a longitudinal study, it was shown that the level of lead in the blood measured at age 11 can somewhat predict the IQ of the same individuals at age 18.

Given that lead levels in the blood are an unhealthy factor that damages a person's mental development and cognitive abilities, public health projects that will be developed to create healthy environments in which children are not exposed to lead will allow individuals to access their genetic potential.

The future is even more promising!

Many neuroscientists consider that IQ, or intelligence in general, is basically based on the anatomical and physiological structure of the brain, and is a highly inherited trait. As can be seen from our review so far, environmental factors can not be said to have any effect on IQ, but a single, simple and effective method that makes it possible to change IQ has not yet been discovered.

Intelligence researchers believe that neuromodulation techniques, which are among the technologies of the future, may increase IQ. A meta-analysis of 15 years of studies on transcranial magnetic stimulation has concluded that this technique shows the potential to improve cognitive abilities.[2] in addition, with techniques such as deep brain stimulation, it may be possible to perform neurological interventions that increase the IQ scores of people in general.

Result

Especially in training programs as a result of the development of internet technology development, simplification of access to healthy foods, improving the result of sociological factors and a better understanding of human relations and the normalization of benefits such as psychological support, such as the improvement of minority rights multifaceted interventions to facilitate access to financial resources, education and general intelligence of the persons and the rates will improve. For example, a meta-analysis conducted in 2018 that examined 28 academic papers involving a total of 600,000 participants shows that every 1 year of education that a person has extra access to contributes 1-5 points to IQ. But exactly how this contribution occurs and the mechanisms of IQ increase have not yet been resolved. For example, you should not expect your IQ to increase by 5-20 points just because you are studying for 4 years of college.

In a phenotypic trait where genetic factors in addition to environmental (especially psychological and sociological) factors are so intensely effective, it can be very difficult to significantly increase IQ scores without biological intervention. At this point, gene editing technologies such as CRISPR and the neurobiological intervention tools we just mentioned can come into play. Of course, the ethical debates that their implementation will create, and issues such as what IQ is from the very beginning, how effective it is, how important it is (or should be), continue to be discussed in the partially scientific, if large, philosophical field. The best thing we can do in this process will be to understand the brain and its interaction with the environment as well as possible.