title: From specialist to generalist: Developmental transformations in the genetic structure of early child abilities.
abstract: The heritability of abilities increases substantially over development, and much of heritable variation in abilities is shared with other abilities. No study, however, has formally tested the extent to which developmental increases in heritability occur on shared versus unique variation in child abilities. A transactional perspective predicts that the relative proportion of shared to total genetic variance will increase with age, whereas an endogenous perspective predicts that such proportion will be invariant with age. We tested these competing predictions using data from a sample of 292 twins providing a total of 578 cross-sectional and longitudinal observations between ages 0 and 6 years on measures of Communication, Gross Motor, Fine Motor, Problem-Solving, and Personal-Social abilities. Consistent with predictions of the transactional perspective, developmental increases in heritability were localized to variance shared across abilities.
authors.affiliation: Department of Psychology, University of Texas at Austin, 108 E. Dean Keeton Street A8000, Austin, TX, 78712-0187.
authors.forename: Amanda K
authors.initials: AK
authors.lastname: Cheung
authors.affiliation: Department of Psychology, University of Texas at Austin, 108 E. Dean Keeton Street A8000, Austin, TX, 78712-0187.|Population Research Center, University of Texas at Austin, Austin, TX.
authors.forename: K Paige
authors.initials: KP
authors.lastname: Harden
authors.affiliation: Department of Psychology, University of Texas at Austin, 108 E. Dean Keeton Street A8000, Austin, TX, 78712-0187.|Population Research Center, University of Texas at Austin, Austin, TX.
authors.forename: Elliot M
authors.initials: EM
authors.lastname: Tucker-Drob
mesh_terms: D001076:Aptitude; D002648:Child; D002657:Child Development; D002675:Child, Preschool; D003142:Communication; D003430:Cross-Sectional Studies; D005260:Female; D006801:Humans; D007223:Infant; D007231:Infant, Newborn; D008137:Longitudinal Studies; D008297:Male; D011340:Problem Solving; D011597:Psychomotor Performance; D019655:Quantitative Trait, Heritable; D011795:Surveys and Questionnaires
keywords: dynamical systems; early child development; generalist genes; genetic commonality; genetic correlation; genetic structure; increasing heritability; mutualism; pleiotropy