Pathfinder: A gamified measure to integrate general cognitive ability into the biological, medical and behavioural sciences

Abstract

Genome-wide association (GWA) studies have uncovered DNA variants associated with individual differences in general cognitive ability (g), but these are far from capturing heritability estimates obtained from twin studies. A major barrier to finding more of this missing heritability is assessment - the use of diverse measures across GWA studies as well as time and cost of assessment. In a series of four studies, we created a 15-minute (40-item), online, gamified measure of g that is highly reliable (alpha = .78; two-week test-retest reliability = .88), psychometrically valid and scalable; we called this new measure Pathfinder. In a fifth study, we administered this measure to 4,751 young adults from the Twins Early Development Study. This novel g measure, which also yields reliable verbal and nonverbal scores, correlated substantially with standard measures of g collected at previous ages (r ranging from .42 at age 7 to .57 at age 16). Pathfinder showed substantial twin heritability (.57, 95% CIs = .43, .68) and SNP heritability (.37, 95% CIs = .04, .70). A polygenic score computed from GWA studies of five cognitive and educational traits accounted for 12% of the variation in g, the strongest DNA-based prediction of g to date. Widespread use of this engaging new measure will advance research not only in genomics but throughout the biological, medical, and behavioural sciences.