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Wim Van der Elst, PhD
Maastricht
University
Faculty of Health, Medicine and Life Sciences
Department of Psychiatry and Neuropsychology
As a graduate
student at the
Department of Psychiatry and Neuropsychology of Maastricht University
(the Netherlands), I was involved in a project in which the influence
of age and age-extrinsic factors on inter-individual differences in
cognitive abilities (such as memory and speed of information
processing) was evaluated. An important aim of this project was to
establish the normal range of performance on commonly used cognitive
test. Norms are a fundamental tool in many cognitive assessment
settings: clinicians and researchers refer to norms whenever they
wonder whether a deficit is present in cognitive functioning (for
example in the context of diagnosing dementia).
At present, I am involved in a large-scale developmental study in which
the determinants of school performance are identified. Earlier research
has shown that IQ is related with school performance, but it explains
only
about 25% of the variance in school performance. The aim of this
project is to determine the extent to which more fundamental cognitive
measures (which quantify e.g. memory or executive functioning) allow
for a better prediction of school performance.