Weird News

[DanaC]

Actually, this is pretty important research with major implications for how children fare in education.

IQ has long been thought to remain stable over a person's lifetime.

The new findings might have implications for kids' educations, the researchers said, because they suggest that children, especially those with lower IQs, should not be pigeonholed into specific educational and career trajectories based on their IQ alone.

"Approximately one-fifth of our sample had very substantial changes such that they moved from above average to below average or vice versa," said Cathy Price, senior study author and professor at the Wellcome Trust Centre for Neuroimaging, University College London, U.K.

The team report that changes in IQ did seem to occur, with some participants improving their scores by as much as 20 points over time, relative to people of similar age, while other kids saw declines in IQ levels.

"A change in 20 points is a huge difference," Price said in a statement to the media. For example, she said, "if an individual moved from an IQ of 110 to an IQ of 130 they move from being 'average' to 'gifted.' And if they moved from 104 to 84 they move from being high average to below average.

In the media statement, Price explained that "the degree to which verbal IQ changed correlated with the degree to which brain structure changed in an area of the brain that we are referring to as a 'motor speech area.' " She added that this region, the brain's left motor cortex, "is very active when we (including the participants in our study) articulate speech."

Nonverbal performance correlated to changes in the anterior cerebellum, which is also activated when making hand movements, Price noted.

The authors don't know yet what is driving these variations in IQ over time.

The same story was covered on the BBC site.

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-15369851

Until now the assumption has been that intellectual capacity, as measured by IQ, stays quite static during life.

But tests conducted on teenagers at an average age of 14 and then repeated when their average age was nearly 18 found improvements - and deterioration

The results show that a change in verbal IQ was found in 39% of the teenagers, with 21% showing a change in "performance IQ" - a test of spatial reasoning.

The findings are seen to have greater validity because for the first time the variations in IQ correlated with changes in two particular areas of the teenagers' brains.

An increase in verbal IQ corresponded with a growth in the density of part of the left motor cortex - a region activated during speech.

And an increase in non-verbal IQ correlated with a rise in the density of the anterior cerebellum - an area associated with movements of the hand.

Professor Price said: "We have a tendency to assess children and determine the course of their education relatively early in life.

"But here we have shown that their intelligence is likely to be still developing.

"We have to be careful not to write off poorer performers at an early age when in fact their IQ may improve significantly given a few more years."

The paper suggests that the results could be "encouraging to those whose intellectual potential may improve and… a warning that early achievers may not maintain their potential".