What is it about?
This work is about the association between recognition memory in prematurely born infants assessed midway and by the end of the first year of life, and later intellectual potential as measured at age 8. Predictors comprised parental SES and performance on the Fagan Test of Infant Intelligence. Each of these indexes made independent and significant contributions to an estimate of mental processing ability at age 8.
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Why is it important?
The results call for attention since both visual recognition memory and parental SES contributed independent and significant variance to the prediction of a composite cognitive measure obtained at age 8. Correlations corrected for unreliability yielded highly significant numbers for the association between a general factor score at age 8 and visual recognition memory and parental SES, respectively.
Perspectives
A novel feature of this study lies in the elucidation of the relations between recognition memory ability and parental SES in determining what and how much a child knows. A child, born into a family of low SES but with good recognition memory ability, may be able to process sufficient information to display typical knowledge development. However, a child, born into the same type of home environment, but with poorer recognition memory ability, may be less able to process what information is available, and thus to gain knowledge.
Professor Lars Smith
University of Oslo
Read the Original
This page is a summary of: The relation of recognition memory in infancy and parental socioeconomic status to later intellectual competence, Intelligence, May 2002, Elsevier,
DOI: 10.1016/s0160-2896(01)00099-x.
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