Gifted Issues Discussion homepage Forums GT Research Gauging the intelligence of infants

The claim about babies was startling: A test administered to infants as young as 6 months could predict their score on an intelligence test years later, when they started school.

“Why not test infants and find out which of them could take more in terms of stimulation?” Joseph F. Fagan III, the psychologist at Case Western Reserve University in Cleveland who developed the test, was quoted as saying in an article by Gina Kolata on April 4, 1989. “It’s not going to hurt anybody, that’s for sure.”

In the test, the infant looks at a series of photographs — first a pair of identical faces, then the same face paired with one the baby hasn’t seen. The researchers measure how long the baby looks at the new face.

“On the surface, it tests novelty preference,” said Douglas K. Detterman, a colleague of Dr. Fagan’s at Case Western.

For reasons not quite understood, babies of below-average intelligence do not exhibit the same attraction to novelty.

Dr. Fagan suggested that the test could be used to identify children with above-average intelligence in poorer families so they could be exposed to enrichment programs more readily available to wealthier families.

But his primary motivation, said Cynthia R. Holland, his wife and longtime collaborator, was to look for babies at the other end of the intelligence curve, those who would fall behind as they grew up.

“His hope was always was to identify early on, in the first year of life, kids who were at risk, cognitively, so we could focus our resources on them and help them out,” said Dr. Holland, a professor of psychology at Cuyahoga Community College.

25 YEARS LATER For the most part, the validity of the Fagan test holds up. Indeed, Dr. Fagan (who died last August) and Dr. Holland revisited infants they had tested in the 1980s, and found that the Fagan scores were predictive of the I.Q. and academic achievement two decades later when these babies turned 21.