David C Geary

David C Geary
University of Missouri | Mizzou · Department of Psychological Sciences, Interdisciplinary Neuroscience

About

433
Publications
325,552
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34,224
Citations
Additional affiliations
August 1989 - present
University of Missouri
Position
  • Curators' Professor

Publications

Publications (433)
Article
Men’s overrepresentation in many STEM (science, technology, engineering, and mathematic) fields is long standing and not fully understood STEM fields drive much of the innovation that fuels economic growth. By not fully utilizing the potential of half the population, economies may be missing out on valuable contributions. Thus, the understanding of...
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In February 2022, Russian Federation troops attacked Ukraine on several front lines, thereby starting a regular war that continues to this day. The invasion garnered worldwide opposition, leading to sanctions imposed on politicians and corporations in the Russian Federation. The war has also left its mark on art, culture, and science. In this study...
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Independent of overall achievement, girls’ intraindividual academic strength is typically reading, whereas boys’ strength is typically mathematics or science. Sex differences in intraindividual strengths are associated with educational and occupational sex disparities in science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) fields. Paradoxically...
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Sixty (35 girls and 25 boys) 9th-grade students’ conceptual understanding of the number line was qualitatively assessed through verbal explanations and visual representations. The assessment included an open-ended question focused on students’ number line descriptions and the explanations coalesced around six features: sequential ordering (i.e., nu...
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The ubiquity of formal education in modern nations is often accompanied by an assumption that students’ motivation for learning is innate and self-sustaining. The latter is true for most children in domains (e.g., language) that are universal and have a deep evolutionary history, but this does not extend to learning in evolutionarily novel domains...
Article
Understanding the magnitudes represented by numerals is a core component of early mathematical development and is often assessed by accuracy in situating numerals and fractions on a number line. Performance on these measures is consistently related to performance in other mathematics domains, but the strength of these relations may be overestimated...
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Science is among humanity’s greatest achievements, yet scientific censorship is rarely studied empirically. We explore the social, psychological, and institutional causes and consequences of scientific censorship (defined as actions aimed at obstructing particular scientific ideas from reaching an audience for reasons other than low scientific qual...
Article
Meta-analytic structural equation modeling was used to estimate the relative contributions of general cognitive ability or g (defined by executive functions, short-term memory, and intelligence) and basic domain-specific mathematical abilities to performance in more complex mathematics domains. The domain-specific abilities included mathematics flu...
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Sixty (35 girls) ninth graders were assessed on measures of algebraic reasoning and usage of visual and symbolic representations (with a prompt for visual use) to solve equations and inequalities. The study grouped visual representations into two categories: arithmetic-visual, which entailed the use of real-world objects to represent specific value...
Article
Acquiring knowledge and understanding of social relationships is a key task for the human child. Methods for studying social networks are constrained by pragmatic issues of time and informant accuracy. Here we report results from a study focused specifically on how measures of cognitive ability – fluid intelligence and working memory – are associat...
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This study describes the development and initial validation of a mathematics-specific spatial vocabulary measure for upper elementary school students. Reviews of spatial vocabulary items, mathematics textbooks, and Mathematics Common Core State Standards identified 720 mathematical terms, 148 of which had spatial content (e.g., edge). In total, 29...
Article
Full-text available
Sixty (35 girls) ninth graders were assessed on measures of algebraic reasoning and usage of visual and symbolic representations (with a prompt for visual use) to solve equations and inequalities. The study grouped visual representations into two categories: arithmetic-visual, which entailed the use of real-world objects to represent specific value...
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Full-text available
There are consistent correlations between mathematics achievement, attitudes, and anxiety, but the longitudinal relations among these constructs are not well understood nor are sex differences in these relations. To address this gap, mathematics achievement, attitudes, and anxiety were longitudinally assessed for 342 (169 boys) adolescents from sev...
Article
Theory in evolutionary educational psychology (EEP) distinguishes between evolved or biologically primary knowledge and non-evolved or biologically secondary knowledge that emerges with formal schooling. The current study explores the associated argument that framing biologically secondary mathematics learning in biologically primary contexts will...
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Two meta-analyses assessed whether the relations between reading and mathematics outcomes could be explained through overlapping skills (e.g., systems for word and fact retrieval) or domain-general influences (e.g., top-down attentional control). The first (378 studies, 1,282,796 participants) included weighted random-effects meta-regression models...
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An evolutionary perspective on academic learning and schooling more generally helps us to understand why learning comes effortlessly in some domains (e.g., language) but only with extensive instruction and cognitive effort in others (e.g., mathematics); why many students’ self-concepts are more strongly influenced by physical traits and social rela...
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Adolescents' (n = 342, 169 boys) general algebra and algebra word problems performance were assessed in 9th grade as were intelligence, academic achievement, working memory, and spatial abilities in prior grades. The adolescents reported on their academic attitudes and anxiety and their teachers reported on their in-class attentive behavior in 7th...
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Narvaez et al. (2022), in their article "Evolving Evolutionary Psychology," argue that mainstream evolutionary psychology is based on misguided neo-Darwinian adaptationist thinking and an antiquated computationalist, "mind-as-computer" framework and offer their own developmentally informed theory as an alternative. While applauding Narvaez et al. f...
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The study tested the hypothesis that there are sex differences in the pathways to mathematical development. Three hundred forty-two adolescents (169 boys) were assessed in various mathematics areas from arithmetic fluency to algebra across 6th to 9th grade, inclusive, and completed a battery of working memory, spatial, and intelligence measures in...
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We investigated the role of working memory in symbolic and spatial algebra and related tasks across five experiments. Each experiment combined a processing task (expression evaluation, arithmetic, coordinate plane, geometry, or mental rotation) with verbal and spatial memory loads in a dual-task design. Spatial memory was compromised in the presenc...
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Schooling is ubiquitous in the modern world and academic development is now a critical aspect of preparation for adulthood. A step back in time to pre-modern societies and an examination of life in remaining traditional societies today reveals that universal formal schooling is an historically recent phenomenon. This evolutionary and historical rec...
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We investigated sex differences in 473,260 adolescents’ aspirations to work in things-oriented (e.g., mechanic), people-oriented (e.g., nurse), and STEM (e.g., mathematician) careers across 80 countries and economic regions using the 2018 Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA). We analyzed student career aspirations in combination wi...
Article
Psychometric studies have consistently identified spatial abilities as a broad domain of human cognition. Spatial abilities are in fact found in species in which engagement with the physical world, as in prey capture or mate searches, influences survival or reproductive prospects and much is now known about the brain and cognitive systems that supp...
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The articles in this special issue provide state-of-the-art reviews of the brain and cognitive systems that are engaged during some aspects of mathematical learning, as well as the self-beliefs, anxiety, and social factors that influence engagement with mathematics, along with discussion of any associated sex differences. These issues are integrate...
Article
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Early life adversity is widely recognized as a key risk factor for early developmental perturbations and contributes to the presentation of neuropsychiatric disorders in adulthood. Neurodevelopmental disorders exhibit a strong sex bias in susceptibility, presentation, onset, and severity, although the underlying mechanisms conferring vulnerability...
Article
Full-text available
Visuomotor integration (VMI) is the ability to coordinate visual perception and motor functioning. Measures of VMI are commonly used to assess children's readiness for academic learning. Attention and investments towards VMI development are mainly focused on early learners, but some empirical research indicates sustained relations between VMI and a...
Chapter
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This handbook is currently in development, with individual articles publishing online in advance of print publication. At this time, we cannot add information about unpublished articles in this handbook, however the table of contents will continue to grow as additional articles pass through the review process and are added to the site. Please note...
Article
The mathematics and reading achievement of 322 adolescents (159 boys) was assessed in seventh and eighth grades, as were their intelligence, working memory, and spatial abilities. Their seventh- and eighth-grade mathematics and English language arts teachers reported on their in-class attentive behavior. The latter emerged as an important predictor...
Preprint
Full-text available
We investigated sex differences in 473,260 adolescents’ aspirations to work in things-oriented (e.g., mechanic), people-oriented (e.g., nurse), and STEM (e.g., mathematician) careers across 80 countries and economic regions using the 2018 Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA). We analyzed student career aspirations in combination wi...
Article
This handbook is currently in development, with individual articles publishing online in advance of print publication. At this time, we cannot add information about unpublished articles in this handbook, however the table of contents will continue to grow as additional articles pass through the review process and are added to the site. Please note...
Article
Full-text available
This study explored the relationship between mathematics vocabulary and mathematics achievement, controlling general vocabulary, for eighth graders (ages 13 to 14) from the United States (US; n = 89) and Turkey (n = 188). The mathematics achievement of Turkish students fell into higher- and lower-achieving groups, with students in the higher-achiev...
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We examined longitudinal relations between 1st-grade cognitive predictors (early nonverbal reasoning, processing speed, listening comprehension, working memory, calculation skill, word-problem solving, word-reading fluency, attentive behavior, and numerical cognition) and 2nd-grade academic outcomes (calculations, word-problem solving, and word rea...
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Pre-algebra mathematical competencies were assessed for a large and diverse sample of sixth graders (n = 1,926), including whole number and fractions arithmetic, conceptual understanding of equality and fractions magnitudes, and the fractions number line. The goal was to determine if there were clusters of students with similar patterns of pre-alge...
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Cognitive scientists have determined that there is a set of mechanisms common to all sensory, perceptual, and cognitive abilities and correlated with age- and disease-related declines in cognition. These mechanisms also contribute to the development and functional coherence of the large-scale brain networks that support complex forms of cognition....
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The contributions of evolutionary processes to human sex differences are vigorously debated. One counterargument is that the magnitude of many sex differences fluctuates from one context to the next, implying an environment origin. Sexual selection provides a framework for integrating evolutionary processes and environmental influences on the origi...
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In response to commentaries, I address questions regarding the proposal that general intelligence (g) is a manifestation of the functioning of intramodular and intermodular brain networks undergirded by the efficiency of mitochondrial functioning (Geary 2018). The core issues include the relative contribution of mitochondrial functioning to individ...
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In the following article, we forward the coalitional value theory (CVT) and apply it to several puzzles about human behavior. The CVT contends that humans evolved unique mental mechanisms for assessing each other’s marginal value to a coalition (i.e., each other’s coalitional value). They defer to those with higher coalitional value, and they asser...
Article
The study tested the hypotheses that boys will have an advantage learning the fractions number line and this advantage will be mediated by spatial abilities. Fractions number line and, as a contrast, fractions arithmetic performance were assessed for 342 adolescents, as was their intelligence, working memory, and various spatial abilities. Boys sho...
Article
Full-text available
The goal was to identify the domain-general cognitive abilities and academic attitudes that are common and unique to reading and mathematics learning difficulties that in turn will have implications for intervention development. Across seventh and eighth grade, 315 (155 boys) adolescents (M age = 12.75 years) were administered intelligence, verbal...
Article
Full-text available
The goal was to identify the domain-general cognitive abilities and academic attitudes that are common and unique to reading and mathematics learning difficulties that in turn will have implications for intervention development. Across seventh and eighth grade, 315 (155 boys) adolescents (M age = 12.75 years) were administered intelligence, verbal...
Article
Full-text available
Evolutionary theory suggests that commonly found sex differences are largest in healthy populations and smaller in populations that have been exposed to stressors. We tested this idea in the context of men’s typical advantage (vs. women) in visuospatial abilities (e.g., mental rotation) and women’s typical advantage (vs. men) in social-cognitive (e...
Preprint
The cultivation of interest is an important aim of education. When encountering new information, the learners’ situational interest is an essential step in the interest development process. Situational interest represents the learner’s heightened attentional focus toward task characteristics (triggered interest) and elevated positive feelings and v...
Preprint
Full-text available
Background: Early life adversity is a risk factor for early developmental perturbations and contributes to the presentation of neuropsychiatric disorders in adulthood. Neurodevelopmental disorders exhibit a strong sex-bias in susceptibility, presentation, onset and severity, although mechanisms conferring vulnerability are not well understood. Envi...
Preprint
Full-text available
Early life adversity is widely recognized as a key risk factor for early developmental perturbations and contributes to the presentation of neuropsychiatric disorders in adulthood. Neurodevelopmental disorders exhibit a strong sex-bias in susceptibility, presentation, onset and severity, although the underlying mechanisms conferring vulnerability a...
Preprint
Full-text available
Early life adversity is widely recognized as a key risk factor for early developmental perturbations and contributes to the presentation of neuropsychiatric disorders in adulthood. Neurodevelopmental disorders exhibit a strong sex-bias in susceptibility, presentation, onset and severity, although the underlying mechanisms conferring vulnerability a...
Article
Full-text available
Identifying meaningful cognitive and non-cognitive predictors of mathematical competence is critical for developing targeted interventions for students struggling with mathematics. Here, 317 students’ short-term verbal memory, verbal and visuospatial working memory, complex spatial abilities, intelligence, and mathematics attitudes and anxiety were...
Article
The extent of sex differences in psychological traits is vigorously debated. We show that the overall sex difference in the pattern of adolescents' achievement and academic attitudes is relatively large and similar across countries. We used a binomial regression modeling approach to predict the sex of 15 and 16 year olds based on sets of academic a...
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Full-text available
Significance In most developed nations, fewer men than women enroll in postsecondary education, with the potential for long-term disruptions in social cohesion and economic development. The underrepresentation of men in college began in the 1990s and has frequently been discussed in national policy debates. To date, there is no comprehensive explan...
Chapter
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Numerous theories have been developed to explain the lower participation of women than men in science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) fields, and associated programs have been developed to address this gap. The theories and programs are predicated on an implicit and, sometimes, explicit assumption that the gap has arisen as a resul...
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The main purpose of this study was to test the effects of word-problem intervention, with versus without embedded language comprehension instruction, on at-risk 1st graders' word-problem performance. We also isolated the need for a structured approach to word-problem intervention and tested the efficacy of schema-based instruction at 1st grade. Chi...
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Although various versions of degraded image tasks exist, the complete process of creating these tasks can be effortful, time-consuming, and costly. The aim of the present tutorial is to provide a step-by-step, user-friendly, economical guide to creating a degraded image task using freely available resources, and provide resources to create multiple...
Article
Full-text available
In a recent theoretical article, I proposed that the efficiency of mitochondrial functioning is the most fundamental biological mechanism contributing to individual differences in general intelligence (g; Geary, 2018). The hypothesis accommodates other contributing mechanisms at higher levels of analysis (e.g., brain networks), and is attractive be...
Preprint
This study tested the hypothesis that sex differences in visuospatial abilities (favoring men) and social-cognitive abilities (favoring women) will be attenuated with chronic stressor exposure, binge drinking in this case. Among light drinkers, men’s typical advantage on visuospatial tasks (Ns = 73, 116; ds = 0.72, 0.49) and women’s typical advanta...
Article
In a preschool through first grade longitudinal study, we identified groups of children with persistently low mathematics achievement (n = 14) and children with low achievement in preschool but average achievement in first grade (n = 23). The preschool quantitative developments of these respective groups of children with mathematical learning disab...
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Full-text available
Neuroimaging studies of subjects with ADHD typically show altered functional connectivity in prefrontal, striatal, and several temporal brain regions. While the majority of studies have focused on connectivity that is averaged over time, we investigated the temporal dynamics of brain network changes in resting-state fMRI. Using the ADHD-200 consort...
Article
Full-text available
General intelligence (g) represents the factors that influence performance across all academic and cognitive domains. The search for these factors has been ongoing for more than a century and has focused on the brain and cognitive systems that support learning and problem solving. In recent decades, it has become clear that the factors that influen...
Preprint
Although various versions of degraded image tasks exist, the complete process of creating these tasks can be effortful, time-consuming, and costly. The aim of the present tutorial is to provide a step-by-step, user-friendly, economical guide to creating a degraded image task using freely available resources, and provide resources to create multiple...
Article
Full-text available
Sex differences in the strength of the relations between mathematics anxiety, mathematics attitudes, and mathematics achievement were assessed concurrently in sixth grade (n = 1,091, 545 boys) and longitudinally from sixth to seventh grade (n = 190, 97 boys). Mathematics anxiety was composed of two facets, one associated with evaluations and the ot...
Article
Full-text available
The Global Gender Gap Index is one of the best-known measures of national gender inequality, used by both academics and policy makers. We argue that that this measure has a number of problems and introduce a simpler measure of national levels of gender inequality. Our proposed measure is based on sex differences in the opportunity to lead a long he...
Data
Basic Index of Gender Inequality (BIGI). Note that countries are ranked by the average of the absolute scores (average absolute deviation from parity, AADP) on the three components 1) educational opportunities, 2) healthy life span, and 3) overall life satisfaction. BIGI scores below zero indicate a net advantage for women (bold), and scores above...
Article
Full-text available
Humans create many apparently functionless artifacts such as paintings, novels, poems, films, and decorative blankets. From an evolutionary perspective, such creations appear somewhat puzzling. Why create artifacts that do not appear to contribute to survival? One recent explanation, the cultural courtship model, argued that such creations are used...
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We present 1st-grade, 2nd-grade, and 3rd-grade impacts for a 1st-grade intervention targeting the conceptual and procedural bases that support arithmetic. At-risk students (average age at pretest = 6.5) were randomly assigned to 3 conditions: a control group (n = 224) and 2 variants of the intervention (same conceptual instruction but different for...
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Educational Impact and Implications Statement Strategy usage may be an important avenue for the identification and treatment of mathematics difficulties. The current study examined individual differences in strategic problem-solving behavior with a sample of adolescent problem-solvers. Results indicate that even in adolescence there are meaningful...