Citation

Engelhardt LE, Briley DA, Mann FD, Harden KP, Tucker-Drob EM. Psychol. Sci. 2015; 26(8): 1151-1163.

Affiliation

Department of Psychology Population Research Center, University of Texas at Austin.

Copyright

(Copyright © 2015, Association for Psychological Science, Publisher John Wiley and Sons)

DOI

10.1177/0956797615577209

PMID

26246520

PMCID

PMC4530525

Abstract

Individual differences in children's executive functions (EFs) are relevant for a wide range of normal and atypical psychological outcomes across the life span, but the origins of variation in children's EFs are not well understood. We used data from a racially and socioeconomically diverse sample of 505 third- through eighth-grade twins and triplets from the Texas Twin Project to estimate genetic and environmental influences on a Common EF factor and on variance unique to four core EF domains: inhibition, switching, working memory, and updating. As has been previously demonstrated in young adults, the Common EF factor was 100% heritable, which indicates that correlations among the four EF domains are entirely attributable to shared genetic etiology. Nonshared environmental influences were evident for variance unique to individual domains. General EF may thus serve as an early life marker of genetic propensity for a range of functions and pathologies later in life.

Language: en