Tilts, developmental modules, and cognitive differentiation-integration effort: A multi-study response to Sorjonen et al. (2024)

Abstract

Sorjonen et al. (2024) critique a recently published finding that cognitive tilts are heritable, which was advanced as a line of evidence supporting their substantive (rather than artefactual) nature. These researchers claim: i) that the heritability of tilts is simply a function of the heritabilities of the specific cognitive dimensions used in their estimation, and ii) that spuriously heritable tilts can be recovered using difference scores between psychometric, anthropometric, and even random number variables. Here, multiple studies employing three behavior genetic datasets are used to test these claims. Even when cognitive tilts are residualized for their association with their constituent abilities, they still exhibit small, but non-zero heritabilities. Shared environmentality (C) accounts for the largest proportion of variance among these residuals. Tilts generated using random numbers are, by contrast, in all cases associated with AE models, exhibiting near 100 % E variance, corresponding to error. In the Swedish Twin Registry, the tilt residual is positively correlated with a measure of life history speed (Mini-K score), suggesting that tilts capture cognitive differentiation-integration effort conditioned developmentally by C variance. Distinct latent factors among psychometric and anthropometric variables in the Georgia Twin Study are also found. These indicate the presence of distinct developmental modules, meaning that tilts estimated using manifest variables associated with different modules lack theoretical credibility, as also evidenced by weak cross loadings.