“Do Children Cause the Cognitive Stimulation They Receive? Modeling the Direction of Causality”, 2022-10-08 ():
We tested the directionality of associations between children’s early-life cognitive development and the cognitive stimulation that they received from their parents.
Our sample included up to 15,314 children from the Twins Early Development Study (TEDS), who were born 1994–2199628ya and assessed at age 3 and 4 years on cognitive development and cognitive stimulation, including singing rhymes, reading books, and playing games. Across a series of genetically informative models, we found:
consistent, bidirectional causal influences from cognitive development at age 3 to cognitive stimulation at age 4, and from cognitive stimulation at age 3 to cognitive development at age 4. The prospective causal paths in both directions accounted for a third and up to half of the constructs’ phenotypic correlations.
Our findings emphasize the active role that children play in constructing their learning experiences, and challenge the idea that children are passive recipients of environmental inputs.
[Keywords: cognitive development, cognitive stimulation, cross-lagged, genetics, polygenic scores]