Genes affect where children look ; affects mental progress

A study led by Indiana university tested the eye movement of identical and fraternal twins, the study was conducted with 233 pairs of twins about half of each were identical and the other half fraternal. this results of this study have found that eye movements to complex social and nonsocial scenes are heritable.  Children were shown 80 images and tracked what are called "tendencies of exploration" and found that identical twins show a very strong link in their analysis of the images and the same affect was evident in fraternal twins but not as strong as the correlation in identical twins. The researchers suggest that their findings show that the basis of visual analysis of images is heritable

There are reasons to be skeptical of the findings of this study, there doesn't appear to be enough of a control in this situation their findings need to be followed up with analysis of random children from different areas/ and different environments, and have no correlation between those children to really prove a genetic  link between the eye movement.
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Genetics helps explain children’s motivation to learn.

A study from Ohio State University suggests that genes may be part of the motivation equation. The study was done on more than 13,000 twins from six countries and found that that about 40-50% of of the differences in children’s motivation to learn could possibly have come from the genetics they inherited from their parents. Stephen Petrill, a professor of psychology at The Ohio State University and a co-author of the study, was surprised by these results because he originally believed that the shared environment of twins, such as family and teachers in common, was a larger factor than genetics. However, genetics and non-shared environmental factors showed the largest effect on learning motivation and the shared environment had an insignificant effect. Petrill said that the findings were pretty consistent across the different countries, even though their cultures and educational systems were different. The study involved separate studies of twins ages 9-16 in the United Kingdom, Canada, Japan, Germany, Russia and United States. The methodology and questions were slightly different in each country, but measured the similar concepts; students completed a measure of how much they enjoyed various academic activities and to rate their own  ability in different subjects. They compared how close the answers were for fraternal twins with identical twins; the amount that the identical twins' answers more closely matched than the fraternal twins', it suggested to the researchers a stronger genetic factor. 

The results that they found does not suggest any gene for how much a child likes to learn, but they interpret the data to show that it's much more complex than originally thought and that genetics may very well be an important factor. I find it interesting because many times, if a child does not like to learn or has trouble, the child is blamed. Parents, teachers, etc. sometimes treat the child as if they are just lazy and punish them in some way for not being able to motivate themselves. This study, I think, is something to work off of because everyone is different and maybe genetics really does play into learning motivation. It's not an excuse, of course, for someone actually just wanting to be lazy and not learn, but some people just don't have the capability and shouldn't be blamed for it. 

‘Language gene’ speeds learning

In a recent article, Christiane Schreiweis, a neuroscientist at the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Leipzig, Germany and colleagues presented experimental work conducted on mice.  In an effort to elucidate the significance of the FOXP2 gene and its involvement in muscle movements for human speech, these scientists genetically engineered mice to produce the human form of the gene FOXP2.  The significance of this gene was suggested in a study conducted in 1990.  In that study, three generations of a British family, which was known as the KE family, suffered from severe speech problems: an inherited mutation inactivated a copy of FOXP2.  In mice, it was found that those mice engineered to make the human FOXP2 protein produced altered squeaks compared to those mice with the mouse version of FOXP2.  Also, the mice with human FOXP2 were shown to contain neurons with more and longer dendrites.  In addition to this, these mice became unresponsive after repeated electrical stimulation to the basal ganglia, which is a trait called long-term depression that typifies learning and memory.   Experiments involving mazes proved that mice with the human FOXP2 gene were quicker to learn.  These scientists believe that the FOXP2 gene in humans plays an important role in perfecting facial movements involved in speech.  FOXP2 involvement in learning and memory are still not completely understood, however.  These experiments could prove to be major breakthroughs for the understanding of human speech.