Age-related differentiation of cognitive abilities in ages 3–7

One important issue in the study of individual differences in cognitive abilities has been the question whether abilities tend to become more differentiated with increasing age. The present study examines age-related differentiation in the structure of cognitive abilities among children 3–7 years of age, using data from the recently undertaken Swedish standardisation of the Wechsler Preschool and Primary Scale of Intelligence-Revised. A confirmatory factor analytic modelling approach is applied. Models of different factor structure are built, evaluated and tested against empirical data using the LISREL 8 and the Mplus2 programs run under the STREAMS modelling environment. The results provide support for the notion that cognitive abilities show increasing differentiation with increasing age.