Studies by the late English psychologist Cyril Burt of IQ scores of separated twins strongly suggested that intelligence was inherited. A summary of recent research costs doubt upon the validity of Burt's work. (SL)

Early mental development of twins and siblings is analyzed, from an evolutionary viewpoint and related to the interplay of genetic programing, maturational status, and environmental influence. (MP)

Prenatal exposure to the Dutch famine of 1944-45 had no detectable effects on the adult mental performance of surviving male offspring; birth weight was not related to mental performance; and the association of social class with mental performance was strong. (AL)

Presents experimental findings that indicate that some number capacity is present in 22-week old infants, long before the onset of verbal counting. Suggests that verbal counting may have precursors present during infancy. (CS)

Investigates the contribution of: (1) parental occupation and education, and (2) school and district characteristics to mental performance of 11-year-olds in Warsaw, Poland. Results obtained by using multiple regression analyses showed that mental performance was related only to parental occupation and education. (HM)

Developmental equations, which predict 32 parameters of the electroencephalogram as a function of age, are presented as tools to indicate children with potential neurological disorders and learning disabilities. (MP)

Chronically undernourished children of low socioeconomic status participated in a treatment program combining nutritional, health care, and educational features. By school age, the gap in cognitive ability between the treated children and a group of privileged children had narrowed. The effect was greater for the youngest preschoolers entering the…

Indicates that 18- to 20-month-old infants can detect the correspondence between auditorially and visually perceived speech; that is, they manifest some of the components related to lip-reading phenomena in adults. This demonstration of the bimodal perception of speech in infancy has important implications for social, cognitive, and linguistic…

Focuses on a single rule of grammar to produce evidence of a memory system for language acquisition and processing that is modular; independent of real-world meaning; unaffected by frequency and similarity; sensitive to formal distinctions; more sophisticated than the explicitly-taught rules it subsumes; developed independently of ambient input;…

Reports that a congenitally blind child, as well as sighted but blindfolded children and adults, can determine the appropriate path between two objects after traveling to each of those objects from a third object. Explores relationships of finding to geometric principles underlyinq innate spatial knowledge and inferential ability. (Author/CS)