Stuart Ritchie is a psychologist whose work focuses on the development of cognitive abilities. He is interested both in the causes of cognitive differences between people (for example, his research has confirmed that education positively affects intelligence test scores) and also the effects of cognitive differences on people’s lives (for example, he is interested in how cognitive abilities relate to mental health). To address these research questions, Stuart uses a range of techniques from different disciplines including psychometrics, cognitive neuroscience, and behaviour genetics.

My plans for the fellowship period

This is a very auspicious time for research on the development of cognitive abilities. Not only are there a huge number of new, large-scale, detailed, often longitudinal datasets available that include cognitive data, but new methods for analyzing the biological and social foundations of cognitive abilities are appearing all the time. However, we’re also at a point where the reliability of many results from psychological research is being questioned as part of the discipline’s “replication crisis”. My research during the fellowship period will attempt simultaneously to address both of these issues, by using a multi-sample research design that builds in replication studies right from the start, asking about the extent to which results found in one dataset apply to those in others. This will include studies from countries that are not usually included in psychology research. I’ll use this methodology to address questions about exactly how education has its effects on cognitive abilities, about how children might overcome early adversity to reach their cognitive potential, and about the prospects and limitations of genetic prediction of cognitive abilities through development.

How will my work change children’s and youth’s lives?

Cognitive functions are some of the most complex, important, and controversial constructs in psychology. They are of crucial importance not just in education, but for many other aspects of our lives: for example, for our performance on the labour market, and for our physical and mental health. They go on mattering right into old age, where understanding differences in rates of cognitive ageing is a critical question for ageing societies. The question of the extent to which we might be able to raise children’s cognitive abilities is therefore one that has major implications for many aspects of society. The only way to answer this question is to have high-quality, replicable evidence about precisely what causes, and what results from, people’s cognitive differences. This will involve distilling the knowledge being gained from genomics, as well as understanding the “environmental” influences—such as education—that we might be able to optimize for greater benefits. My interests in helping to tighten up methodology in psychology research—for example, by performing multi-cohort replication studies, and by instituting best practices like pre-registration and online sharing of analytic code—should serve as an example of how research results can be made more reliable, for everyone’s benefit.

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Michel Nivard is a psychologist that studies the development of both psychopathology and cognition. He does so by using genetics as a tool to learn more about the sociological, psychological and biological processes that give rise to (un)healthy development and adult outcomes.

My plans for the fellowship period

In the fellowship period I want to take findings from large (1.000.000 participants or more) genome wide association studies of educational success and move beyond simply identifying which genes contribute to educational success, but also study how they do so. This question has many answers: genes act on proteins in a specific tissue (e.g. the brain or excitatory neurons) to affect biology, these effects may influence the psyche of a child at many points in development, at home, pre-school, primary school or puberty, the effects of genes must be considered I the context of the social environment.

How will my work change children’s and youth’s lives?

Genomics in educational sciences offers immense opportunity to study and understand the educational and cognitive developmental process. Educational sciences often are held back by the inability to perform large scale randomized experiments, in the absence of experiments to establish causal effects of interventions on real life outcomes, techniques that rely on genetic for pseudo randomization (e.g. Mendelian randomization) may offer a solution, but only if we further our understanding of the relationship between genome and the educational process.

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Fabian Kosse’s main research interest lies in the interplay of economics and developmental as well as personality psychology. He is especially interested in how preferences, personality, beliefs, and skills are formed and he particularly focuses on the role of early social environment and life circumstances. Moreover, he also explores consequences of individual heterogeneities on educational, health and labor market outcomes. Methodically, he combines long-term field experiments with micro econometric panel data methods, incentivized measures and the use of biomarkers.

My plans for the fellowship period

I will primarily build upon the “Your Goals, Your Way” panel, which focuses on how the early social environment of children influences their formation of preferences and personality. The main component of the “Your Goals, Your Way” panel is the intervention program “Baloo and You”, which was implemented as a RCT in 2011/2012, providing elementary school students with a mentor for the timespan of one year. With the help of the fellowship, I plan to design, collect and analyze the new chapter of data collections focusing on late adolescence to young adulthood (2020-2022). I plan to proceed in two steps. Firstly, two additional measures of preferences and personality will be designed and included as part of the new data collections. The focus of the second step will be on the development of happiness as an important summary outcome variable to give insights into the general long-term consequences of inequalities arising during childhood.

How will my work change children’s lives?

The aim of my research is to enhance our understanding of the malleability of individual inequalities. Evaluating the effectiveness of an intervention programs and understanding whether and how mentoring programs help to change preference patterns and skill levels in the long-run is of relevance not only for behavioral sciences but also for informing policy, as it helps to uncover reasons for social mobility and target intervention programs. To this effect, especially the understanding of malleability of skills, preferences and personality in response to social environment is of great interest.

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