Humans have many cognitive skills not possessed by their nearest primate relatives. The cultural intelligence hypothesis argues that this is mainly due to a species-specific set of social-cognitive skills, emerging early in ontogeny, for participating and exchanging knowledge in cultural groups. We tested this hypothesis by giving a comprehensive battery of cognitive tests to large numbers of t...

The impact of early childhood health shocks on long-term outcomes has long been a major focus in the economics literature. This paper employs a detailed panel dataset in a poor, rural province in China to analyze the impact of early childhood shocks, proxied by rainfall in the county and year of birth, on the evolution of cognitive and non-cognitive skills over time. The results suggest that th...

Complementing prior research on income and educational mobility, we examine the intergenerational transmission of cognitive abilities. We find that individuals’ cognitive skills are positively related to their parents’ abilities, despite controlling for educational attainment and family background. Differentiating between mothers’ and fathers’ IQ transmission, we find different effects on the c...

This paper presents the Primitive Elements theory of cognitive skills. The central idea is that skills are broken down into primitive information processing elements that move and compare single pieces of information regardless of the specific content of this information. Several of these primitive elements are necessary for even a single step in a task. A learning process therefore combines th...

Embedded Training Systems provide a new opportunity for training not only procedural or systems skills, but also the higher-level cognitive skills that are critical for successful performance on today’s battlefield. We have developed a principled approach for training the essential cognitive skills underlying high levels of situation awareness (SA) and decision making that can be easily employe...