Running Head: BRAIN DEVELOPMENT, GENDER, AND IQ

Brain development, gender and IQ in children: A volumetric imaging study

National University
Understanding Young Children: Cognition and the Growing Child
In partial fulfillment of ECE 652
Assignment 2.1
Dr. Brenda Sheppard-Johnson
April 2010

Brain development, gender and IQ in children: A volumetric imaging study

Recap The quantitative study conducted by Reiss, Abrams, Singer, Ross, and Denckla, attempts to answer the question of how brain size, and more importantly cerebral capacity, differs between genders; what, if any, correlation exists between brain morphology; and are there any patterns of age–related changes evident in during childhood. (Reiss et al., 1996, p. 1764) This is one of a few studies that utilizes volumetric imaging to “describe cerebral development and morphology” in normal, non-clinically referred children. (Reiss et al., 1996)
Process
100 children between the ages of five and seventeen were given MRI scans of their brains. Of these 100 images, only 85 were used in the final data analysis due to 15 not containing the entire cerebrum in the end result. There were sixty-four females and twenty-one males. The mean ages were 10.6 and 10.7 respectively. The difference between the numbers of girls to boys was due to researchers “recruitment of gender-matched normal controls for ongoing studies of female children with specific genetic conditions such as fragile X syndrome and Turner Syndrome. (Reiss et al., 1996) For these subjects with such genetic problems, control subjects were chosen from a pool of their “normal” siblings who had been tested and shown to be negative for these syndromes. All were shown to exhibit adequate success in the classroom, and had normal IQ’s. A majority of the subjects were found through