Abstract
Intelligence testing has a long and revered history in psychological measurement in childhood. Yet, the years between infancy and early childhood have been understudied with respect to emergent intellectual and cognitive functioning. Factor analytic models of intelligence that have demonstrated applicability when testing older children and adults often appear inadequate in the preschool period. As more is learned about brain development in typically developing children during these crucial years the distinctive relationships between neural system development and intellectual functioning are being revealed more completely. The aim of this paper was to provide a brief historical background as a foundation for discussion of intelligence testing, review what is known about the dynamic course of brain development during the preschool years, acknowledge limitations specific to intelligence testing in young children, and provide support for maintaining a comprehensive neuropsychological perspective that considers the wider range of variables that influence intellectual functioning in the preschool period.
Similar content being viewed by others
References
Amso, D., & Casey, B. J. (2006). Beyond what develops when: neuroimaging may inform how cognition changes with development. Current Directions in Psychological Science, 15, 24–29.
Anderson, V., Catroppa, C., Morse, S., Haritou, F., & Rosenfeld, J. V. (2009). Intellectual outcome from preschool traumatic brain injury: a 5-year prospective, longitudinal study. Pediatrics, 124, e1064–e1071.
Andersson, H. W., Sonnander, K., & Sommerfelt, K. (1998). Gender and its contribution to the prediction of cognitive abilities at 5 years. Scandinavian Journal of Psychology, 39, 267–274.
Andreasen, N. C., Flaum, M., Swayze, V., O’Leary, D. S., Alliger, R., Cohen, G., …Yuh, W. T. (1993). Intelligence and brain structure in normal individuals. The American Journal of Psychiatry, 150, 130–134.
Arend, I., Colom, R., Botella, J., Contreras, M. J., Rubio, V., & Santacreu, J. (2003). Quantifying cognitive complexity: evidence from a reasoning task. Personality and Individual Differences, 35, 659–669.
Ballantyne, A. O., Spilkin, A. M., Hesselink, J., & Trauner, D. A. (2008). Plasticity in the developing brain: intellectual, language and academic functions in children with ischaemic perinatal stroke. Brain, 131(Pt 11), 2975–2985.
Baron, I. S. (2004). Neuropsychological evaluation of the child. New York: Oxford University Press.
Bartels, M., Rietveld, M. J., Van Baal, G. C., & Boomsma, D. I. (2002). Genetic and environmental influences on the development of intelligence. Behavior Genetics, 32, 237–249.
Bjorklund, D. F. (1999). What individual differences can teach us about developmental function and vice versa. In F. E. W. W. Schneider (Ed.), Individual development from 3 to 12: The munich longitudinal study on the genesis of individual competencies (LOGIC) (pp. 29–37). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Bjorklund, D. F. (2005). Children’s thinking: Cognitive development and individual differences. Belmont: Thomson Wadsworth.
Blair, C. (2007). Inherent limits on the identification of a neural basis for general intelligence. The Behavioral and Brain Sciences, 30, 154–155.
Bornstein, M. H. (1985). How infant and mother jointly contribute to developing cognitive competence in the child. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America, 82, 7470–7473.
Bouchard, T. J., Jr., & McGue, M. (1981). Familial studies of intelligence: a review. Science, 212, 1055–1059.
Cantlon, J. F., Pinel, P., Dehaene, S., & Pelphrey, K. A. (2011). Cortical representations of symbols, objects, and faces are pruned back during early childhood. Cerebral Cortex, 21, 191–199.
Carroll, J. B. (1993). Human cognitive abilites: A survey of factor-analytic studies. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Cattell, R. B. (1963). Theory of fluid and crystallized intelligence. Journal of Educational Psychology, 54, 1–22.
Ceci, S. J. (1990). On intelligence…more or less: A bioecological treatiseon intellectual development. Englewood Cliffs: Prentice Hall.
Choi, Y. Y., Shamosh, N. A., Cho, S. H., DeYoung, C. G., Lee, M. J., Lee, J. M., & Lee, K. H. (2008). Multiple bases of human intelligence revealed by cortical thickness and neural activation. The Journal of Neuroscience, 28, 10323–10329.
Colom, R. (2007). Intelligence? What intelligence? The Behavioral and Brain Sciences, 30, 155–156.
Colom, R., Abad, F. J., Garcia, L. F., & Juan-Espinosa, M. (2002). Education, Wechsler’s full scale IQ, and g. Intelligence, 30, 449-462.
Colom, R., Jung, R. E., & Haier, R. J. (2006). Distributed brain sites for the g-factor of intelligence. NeuroImage, 31, 1359–1365.
Das, J. P., Kirby, J., & Jarman, R. F. (1975). Simultaneous and successive syntheses. Psychological Bulletin, 82, 87–103.
Davis, O. S., Haworth, C. M., & Plomin, R. (2009). Dramatic increase in heritability of cognitive development from early to middle childhood: an 8-year longitudinal study of 8,700 pairs of twins. Psychological Science, 20, 1301–1308.
Deary, I. J., Penke, L., & Johnson, W. (2010). The neuroscience of human intelligence differences. Nature Reviews. Neuroscience, 11, 201–211.
Doyle, L. W., Davis, P. G., Schmidt, B., & Anderson, P. J. (2012). Cognitive outcome at 24 months is more predictive than at 18 months for IQ at 8–9 years in extremely low birth weight children. Early Human Development, 88, 95–98.
Duncan, J., Seitz, R. J., Kolodny, J., Bor, D., Herzog, H., Ahmed, A., & Emslie, H. (2000). A neural basis for general intelligence. Science, 289, 457–460.
Elliott, C. D. (2007). Differential ability scales-II. San Antonio: Harcourt Assessment.
Flashman, L. A., Andreason, N. C., Flaum, M., & Swayze, V. W. (1997). Intelligence and regional brain volume in normal controls. Intelligence, 25, 149–160.
Galsworthy, M. J., Dionne, G., Dale, P. S., & Plomin, R. (2000). Sex differences in early verbal and non-verbal cognitive development. Developmental Science, 3, 206–215.
Galton, F. (1869). Hereditary genius: An inquiry into its laws and consequences. London: Macmillan and Co.
Gardner, H. (1983). Frames of mind: The theory of multiple intelligences. New York: Basic Books.
Giedd, J. N., Blumenthal, J., Jeffries, N. O., Castellanos, F. X., Liu, H., Zijdenbos, A., & Rapoport, J. L. (1999). Brain development during childhood and adolescence: a longitudinal MRI study. Nature Neuroscience, 2, 861–863.
Giedd, J. N., Stockman, M., Weddle, C., Liverpool, M., Alexander-Bloch, A., Wallace, G. L., & Lenroot, R. K. (2010). Anatomic magnetic resonance imaging of the developing child and adolescent brain and effects of genetic variation. Neuropsychology Review, 20, 349–361.
Gray, J. R., Chabris, C. F., & Braver, T. S. (2003). Neural mechanisms of general fluid intelligence. Nature Neuroscience, 6, 316–322.
Hack, M., Taylor, H. G., Drotar, D., Schluchter, M., Cartar, L., Wilson-Costello, D., & Morrow, M. (2005). Poor predictive validity of the bayley scales of infant development for cognitive function of extremely low birth weight children at school age. Pediatrics, 116, 333–341.
Haier, R. J., Jung, R. E., Yeo, R. A., Head, K., & Alkire, M. T. (2004). Structural brain variation and general intelligence. NeuroImage, 23, 425–433.
Horn, J. L., & Cattell, R. B. (1966). Refinement and test of the theory of fluid and crystallized general intelligences. Journal of Educational Psychology, 57, 253–270.
Huttenlocher, P. R. (1979). Synaptic density in human frontal cortex- developmental changes and effects of aging. Brain Research, 163, 195–205.
Jensen, A. R. (1998). The g factor: The science of mental ability. Westport: Praeger.
Johnson, M. H. (2001). Functional brain development in humans. Nature Reviews. Neuroscience, 2, 475–483.
Johnson, W., & Bouchard, T. J. (2005). The structure of human intelligence: it is verbal, perceptual, and image rotation (VPR), not fluid and crystallized. Intelligence, 33, 393–416.
Jung, R. E., & Haier, R. J. (2007). The parieto-frontal integration theory (P-FIT) of intelligence: converging neuroimaging evidence. The Behavioral and Brain Sciences, 30, 135–154.
Kadosh, R. C., Walsh, V., & Henik, A. (2007). Selecting between intelligent options. The Behavioral and Brain Sciences, 30, 155.
Karama, S., Ad-Dab’bagh, Y., Haier, R. J., Deary, I. J., Lyttelton, O. C., Lepage, C., Evans, A. C., & Brain Development Cooperative Group. (2009). Positive association between cognitive ability and cortical thickness in a representative US sample of healthy 6 to 18 year olds. Intelligence, 37, 145–155.
Karrass, J., & Braungart-Rieker, J. M. (2004). Infant negative emotionality and attachment: implications for preschool intelligence. International Journal of Behavioral Development, 28, 221–229.
Kawakubo, Y., Kono, T., Takizawa, R., Kuwabara, H., Ishii-Takahashi, A., & Kasai, K. (2011). Developmental changes of prefrontal activation in humans: a near-infrared spectroscopy study of preschool children and adults. PLoS One, 6, e25944.
Kuwajima, M., & Sawaguchi, T. (2010). Similar prefrontal cortical activities between general fluid intelligence and visuospatial working memory tasks in preschool children as revealed by optical topography. Experimental Brain Research, 206, 381–397.
Lebel, C., & Beaulieu, C. (2011). Longitudinal development of human brain wiring continues from childhood into adulthood. The Journal of Neuroscience, 31, 10937–10947.
Lenroot, R. K., Gogtay, N., Greenstein, D. K., Wells, E. M., Wallace, G. L., Clasen, L. S., & Giedd, J. N. (2007). Sexual dimorphism of brain developmental trajectories during childhood and adolescence. NeuroImage, 36, 1065–1073.
Lenroot, R. K., Schmitt, J. E., Ordaz, S. J., Wallace, G. L., Neale, M. C., Lerch, J. P., & Giedd, J. N. (2009). Differences in genetic and environmental influences on the human cerebral cortex associated with development during childhood and adolescence. Human Brain Mapping, 30, 163–174.
Lubinski, D. (2004). General intelligence’, objectively determined and measured. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 86, 96–111.
MacLullich, A. M., Ferguson, K. J., Deary, I. J., Seckl, J. R., Starr, J. M., & Wardlaw, J. M. (2002). Intracranial capacity and brain volumes are associated with cognition in healthy elderly men. Neurology, 59, 169–174.
McDaniel, M. A. (2005). Big-brained people are smarter: a meta-analysis of the relationship between in vivo brain volume and intelligence. Intelligence, 33, 337–346.
McGrew, K. S. (2005). The cattell-horn-carroll theory of cognitive abilities: past, present, and future. In D. P. Flanagan, J. L. Genshaft, & P. L. Harrison (Eds.), Contemporary intellectual assessment: Theories, tests, and issues (pp. 136–182). New York: Guilford.
Narr, K. L., Woods, R. P., Thompson, P. M., Szeszko, P., Robinson, D., Dimtcheva, T., & Bilder, R. M. (2007). Relationships between IQ and regional cortical gray matter thickness in healthy adults. Cerebral Cortex, 17, 2163–2171.
Potharst, E. S., Houtzager, B. A., van Sonderen, L., Tamminga, P., Kok, J. H., Last, B. F., & van Wassenaer, A. G. (2012). Prediction of cognitive abilities at the age of 5 years using developmental follow-up assessments at the age of 2 and 3 years in very preterm children. Developmental Medicine and Child Neurology, 54, 240–246.
Prabhakaran, V., Smith, J. A., Desmond, J. E., Glover, G. H., & Gabrieli, J. D. (1997). Neural substrates of fluid reasoning: an fMRI study of neocortical activation during performance of the Raven’s progressive matrices test. Cognitive Psychology, 33, 43–63.
Quereshi, M. Y., & Seitz, R. (1994). Gender differences on the WPPSI, the WISC-R, and the WPPSI-R. Current Psychology, 13, 117–123.
Rathbone, R., Counsell, S. J., Kapellou, O., Dyet, L., Kennea, N., Hajnal, J., & Edwards, A. D. (2011). Perinatal cortical growth and childhood neurocognitive abilities. Neurology, 77, 1510–1517.
Reiss, A. L., Abrams, M. T., Singer, H. S., Ross, J. L., & Denckla, M. B. (1996). Brain development, gender and IQ in children. A volumetric imaging study. Brain, 119(Pt 5), 1763–1774.
Rushton, J. P., & Ankney, C. D. (2009). Whole brain size and general mental ability: a review. The International Journal of Neuroscience, 119, 691–731.
Sattler, J. M. (1988). Assessment of Intelligence (3rd ed.). San Diego: Jerome M. Sattler.
Sattler, J. M. (2001). Assessment of children: Cognitive applications (4th ed.). La Mesa: Jerome M. Sattler.
Saxon, T. F., Colombo, J., Robinson, E. L., & Frick, J. E. (2000). Dyadic interaction profiles in infancy and preschool intelligence. Journal of School Psychology, 38, 9–25.
Schmitt, J. E., Eyler, L. T., Giedd, J. N., Kremen, W. S., Kendler, K. S., & Neale, M. C. (2007). Review of twin and family studies on neuroanatomic phenotypes and typical neurodevelopment. Twin Research and Human Genetics, 10, 683–694.
Schneider, W., Perner, J., Bullock, M., Stefanek, J., & Ziegler, A. (1999). Development of intelligence and thinking. In F. E. W. W. Schneider (Ed.), Individual development from 3 to 12: The Munich longitudinal study on the genesis of individual competencies (LOGIC) (pp. 9–28). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Schumann, C. M., Hamstra, J., Goodlin-Jones, B. L., Kwon, H., Reiss, A. L., & Amaral, D. G. (2007). Hippocampal size positively correlates with verbal IQ in male children. Hippocampus, 17, 486–493.
Shaw, P., Greenstein, D., Lerch, J., Clasen, L., Lenroot, R., Gogtay, N., & Giedd, J. (2006). Intellectual ability and cortical development in children and adolescents. Nature, 440, 676–679.
Simonton, D. K. (2003). Francis Galton’s hereditary genius: its place in the history and psychology of science. In R. J. Sternberg (Ed.), The anatomy of impact: What makes the great works of psychology great (pp. 3–18). Washington: American Psychological Association.
Sowell, E. R., Peterson, B. S., Thompson, P. M., Welcome, S. E., Henkenius, A. L., & Toga, A. W. (2003). Mapping cortical change across the human life span. Nature Neuroscience, 6, 309–315.
Spearman, C. E. (1923). The nature of intelligenceand the principles of cognition. London: Macmillan.
Stern, W. (1912). The psychological methods of intelligence testing (G. Whipple, Trans.). Baltimore: Warwick and York.
Sternberg, R. J. (1985). Beyond IQ: A triarchic theory of human intelligence. New York: Cambridge University Press.
Sternberg, R. J. (1999). The theory of successful intelligence. Review of General Psychology, 3, 292–316.
Sternberg, R. J., & Berg, C. A. (1986). Quantitative integration: definitions of intelligence: a comparison of the 1921 and 1986 symposia. In R. J. Sternberg & D. K. Detterman (Eds.), What is intelligence? Contemporary viewpoints on its nature and definition (pp. 155–162). Norwood: Ablex.
Terman, L. (1916). The measurement of intelligence. Boston: Houghton Mifflin.
Thatcher, R. W. (1991). Maturation of the human frontal lobes: physiological evidence for staging. Developmental Neuropsychology, 7, 397–419.
Thompson, P. M., Cannon, T. D., Narr, K. L., van Erp, T., Poutanen, V. P., Huttunen, M., & Toga, A. W. (2001). Genetic influences on brain structure. Nature Neuroscience, 4, 1253–1258.
Thorndike, R., Hagen, E. P., & Sattler, J. M. (1986). Technical manual: Stanford-binet intelligence scale (4th ed.). Chicago: Riverside.
Thurstone, L. L. (1938). Primary mental abilities. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Tsujimoto, S. (2008). The prefrontal cortex: functional neural development during early childhood. The Neuroscientist, 14, 345–358.
Vernon, P. E. (1950). The structure of human abilities. London: Methuen.
Waltz, J. A., Knowlton, B. J., Holyoak, K. J., Boone, K. B., Mishkin, F. S., & de Menezes Santos, M. (1999). A system for relational reasoning in human prefrontal cortex. Psychological Science, 10, 119–125.
Ward, K. E., Rothlisberg, B. A., & McIntosh, D. E. (2011). Assessing the SB-V factor structure in a sample of preschool children. Psychology in the Schools, 48, 454–463.
Wechsler, D. (1939). The measurement of adult intelligence. Baltimore: Williams and Wilkins.
White, K. R. (1982). The relation between socioeconomic status and academic achievement. Psychological Bulletin, 91, 461–481.
Witelson, S. F., Beresh, H., & Kigar, D. L. (2006). Intelligence and brain size in 100 postmortem brains: sex, lateralization and age factors. Brain, 129(Pt 2), 386–398.
Woodcock, R. W., & Johnson, M. B. (1989). Woodcock-johnson psycho-educational battery-revised. Allen: DLM Teaching Resources.
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Corresponding author
Rights and permissions
About this article
Cite this article
Baron, I.S., Leonberger, K.A. Assessment of Intelligence in the Preschool Period. Neuropsychol Rev 22, 334–344 (2012). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11065-012-9215-0
Received:
Accepted:
Published:
Issue Date:
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11065-012-9215-0