Do more intelligent brains retain heightened plasticity for longer in development? A computational investigation

• The heritability of general cognitive ability increases with age; this occurs later for high ability individuals.
• General cognitive ability is associated with differential rates of change of brain structure.
• We use computational modeling of population development to link genes, brain and behavior.
• We provide the first unified mechanistic account of these data.
• Data are explained by the increasing non-linear behavior of neurocomputational systems across development causing divergence between non-identical twins.

Twin studies indicate that the heritability of general cognitive ability – the genetic contribution to individual differences – increases with age. Brant et al. (2013) reported that this increase in heritability occurs earlier in development for low ability children than high ability children. Allied with structural brain imaging results that indicate faster thickening and thinning of cortex for high ability children (Shaw et al., 2006), Brant and colleagues argued higher cognitive ability represents an extended sensitive period for brain development. However, they admitted no coherent mechanistic account can currently reconcile the key empirical data. Here, computational methods are employed to demonstrate the empirical data can be reconciled without recourse to variations in sensitive periods. These methods utilized population-based artificial neural network models of cognitive development. In the model, ability-related variations stemmed from the timing of the increases in the non-linearity of computational processes, causing dizygotic twins to diverge in their behavior. These occurred in a population where: (a) ability was determined by the combined small contributions of many neurocomputational factors, and (b) individual differences in ability were largely genetically constrained. The model’s explanation of developmental increases in heritability contrasts with proposals that these increases represent emerging gene-environment correlations (Haworth et al., 2010). The article advocates simulating inherited individual differences within an explicitly developmental framework.