14 DAY TRIAL // In a new study conducted by psychologists at University of Texas in San Antonio (UT), it was revealed that teens and adolescents tend to become gradually smarter because they become mentally quicker. This connection has been hypothesized for some time, but thus far no one was able to confirm it.
Experts in charge of the work say that the conclusions are intuitive and make sense. They have made sense for quite some time now, but finding scientific proof to confirm popular wisdom is not always as easy as it may seem, medicalXpress reports.
UT professor Thomas Coyle was the lead author of the new study, which he conducted with the help of fellow UT experts David Pillow, Anissa Snyder, and Peter Kochunov. The study will appear in an upcoming issue of the medical journal Psychological Science.
The publication is edited by the Association for Psychological Science (APS). The paper represents the first uncontroversial proof that such a link indeed exists. “Our research was based on two well-known findings,” Coyle explains.
“The first is that performance on intelligence tests increases during adolescence. The second is that processing speed as measured by tests of mental speed also increases during adolescence,” he adds.
For the new study, processing speed was defined as the brain's ability to weigh in and use new stimuli or information in a useful, efficient manner. The new investigation was conducted on 6,969 teens and adolescents, aged between 13 and 17.
Each of the participants had to answer a battery of 12 intelligence and mental speed tests. Researchers then centralized their answers, and developed statistical predictions based on what the data indicated. The teens were selected from the 1997 National Longitudinal Survey of Youth.
Vocabulary knowledge, math facts, and mechanical comprehension were just three of the many abilities that researchers took into account when measuring participants' intelligence levels. Similarly, mental speed was assessed primarily through rapid arithmetic tasks, such as matching digits and words.
This high level of “performance on intelligence tests reflects, in part, the speed of acquiring knowledge, learning things, and solving problems,” Coyle explains. He says that older adolescents fared better than younger ones on all the tests.
What this implies is that the cognitive development of children is directly linked to the increase in processing power that comes with a maturing brain.