Are our tests of intelligence really measuring universal abilities, or are they shaped by schooling and culture? In this episode, we explore how environment influences executive function and why that matters for the science of intelligence.

In the first episode of the RIOT IQ Podcast, host Dr. Russell Warne, Chief Scientist at Riot IQ, talks with Ivan Kroupin, a cross-cultural cognitive scientist at the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology. Ivan is the lead author of The Cultural Construction of Executive Function, published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

Ivan shares stories from his fieldwork in Namibia, Angola, and Bolivia, where children often show impressive real-world skills that standard tests fail to capture. Together, they discuss what this means for psychology, anthropology, and intelligence research, and why it is so important to understand the cultural side of human cognition.

If you are curious about how people think, learn, and adapt in different environments, this episode will give you a fresh way to look at intelligence.

Read the open-access article here: https://www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/pnas.2407955122