Charting the cognitive development of children using adult ‘polygenic g scores’

This is the authors' abstract. We don't add key points for this paper.

The most highly predictive polygenic scores in the behavioural sciences are for cognitive traits, especially general cognitive ability (g) and educational achievement. We combined polygenic scores derived from genome-wide association studies of adult g and educational attainment, conditioned on their prediction of adult g, to create adult 'polygenic g scores' which we used to chart the course of cognitive development of 10,000 white British children from infancy through early adulthood. We integrated cross-sectional regression, latent growth curve, and cross-time common factor analysis to systematically characterise cognitive development. Polygenic g score showed minimal prediction in infancy, modest prediction in childhood, and substantial prediction by early adulthood, accounting for 12% of the variance. Higher polygenic g scores were associated with faster cognitive growth in latent growth models. Prediction was strongest for a cross-time common cognitive factor (15%), reflecting substantial stable genetic influences across development. We also examined the polygenic g score's prediction of educational achievement, behaviour problems, and anthropometric outcomes and found similar developmental increases in prediction for educational achievement. Together, our findings demonstrated that adult polygenic g scores can be a useful tool for charting the development of cognitive traits.