A study of familial resemblance for two cognitive psychometric tests by permutation analyses

The recently expanded structured exploratory data analysis (SEDA) methodology is applied to two psychometric test scores of Caucasian and Japanese families who participated in the Hawaii Family Study of Cognition. Our analyses focused on the Raven progressive matrices (PM) test, which assesses deductive reasoning aptitude, and the Thurstone vocabulary (VOC) test, which bears on verbal facility. Both tests revealed pronounced spouse closeness and parent-child similarity. The degree of closeness of a child to the midparental value tends to be stronger than the corresponding level of closeness of a child to each separate parent. In addition, sex asymmetries in our assessments of parent-child closeness appeared, which also differ between the two ethnic groups. Deductive reasoning abilities of daughters were relatively closer to those of their parents in the Americans of Japanese ancestry (AJA) group than in the Americans of European ancestry (AEA) group. The opposite ordering was realized with respect to parent-son closeness measures. In terms of verbal aptitudes, measures of parent-offspring closeness were stronger in the AJA group compared to the AEA group, for both sons and daughters. Possible interpretations related to cultural and behavioral covariates in the populations studied are given.This work was supported by NHLBI Grants HL29447-02, HL30856-01, and GM10452-18.