

$13 Christmas gifts = 13 point gain in kids’ IQ - shawndumas
http://blog.newsweek.com/blogs/nurtureshock/archive/2009/12/10/new-research-13-christmas-gifts-13-point-gain-in-kids-iq.aspx?print=true

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Oxryly
Without a control group, or at least a group doing something other than
playing games during that time, it's hard to say the games caused the effect
they observed.

Maybe just staying after school with highly interested researchers had a
knock-on effect on intelligence?

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hugh3
IQ tests are to a certain extent a learned skill; you get accustomed to the
sorts of questions which get asked. If the kids had never seen an IQ test
before their first one then just the effect of testing 'em twice in a row
could easily account for 13 points.

I bet I could do a study which showed you could get a similar gain by showing
'em a youtube clip of giraffes mating.

~~~
jgilliam
Right, because you know how to conduct a brain study better than a
neuroscientist at UC Berkeley who's been working on this for years.

~~~
arethuza
Well, if IQ is so easily changed that I would argue that it is a pretty
useless metric for measuring innate capabilities.

I have an older (16 years older) sister who trained as an educational
psychologist - I was given all kinds of tests from an early age and I
certainly learned how to do them so that later in my childhood I would always
get ridiculously high marks on those kinds of tests and it was always pretty
clear to me that it was just because I knew the tricks of doing these tests,
not that I was particularly bright or that doing the tests increases your
actual level of intelligence.

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sitmaster
I thought that lots of studies had been done like this, and these types of
gains always turned out to be short term. The article doesn't say whether the
gains stayed with them weeks or months after the games ended.

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shawndumas
<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1283670>

