Prediction of childhood cognitive abilities from a set of early indicators of information processing capabilities

Childhood tests of intelligence are often composed of several different tasks or scales. In contrast to this, many studies assessing early indicators of cognitive ability include only one or two different infant paradigms. The present study employs an extended set of infant paradigms for the prediction of childhood development and intelligence. Two groups of infants (64 three- and 63 six-months olds) were tested. Subjects were retested at 24- and 32-months of age with several indicators related to developmental state, verbal skills and intelligence. Especially in the group of 6-month-olds, the analysis demonstrated that significant R2 contributions were yielded by a set of different predictor variables. The results show that a set of predictors in contrast to single predictors leads to a substantial increase of the variance accounted for.