Many forms of intervention, across different domains, have the surprising effect of widening preexisting gaps between disadvantaged youth and their advantaged counterparts--if such interventions are made available to all students, not just to the disadvantaged. Whether this widening of gaps is incongruent with American interests and values requires an awareness of this gap-widening potential when interventions are universalized and a national policy that addresses the psychological, political, economic, and moral dimensions of elevating the top students--tomorrow's business and science leaders--and/or elevating the bottom students to redress past inequalities and reduce the future costs associated with them. This article is a first step in bringing this dilemma to the attention of scholars and policymakers and prodding a national discussion.

In a multistage experiment, twelve 4- and 9-year-old children participated in a triad rating task. Their ratings were mapped with multidimensional scaling, from which euclidean distances were computed to operationalize semantic distance between items in target pairs. These children and age-mates then participated in an experiment that employed these target pairs in a story, which was followed by a misinformation manipulation. Analyses linked individual and developmental differences in suggestibility to children's representations of the target items. Semantic proximity was a strong predictor of differences in suggestibility: The closer a suggested distractor was to the original item's representation, the greater was the distractor's suggestive influence. The triad participants' semantic proximity subsequently served as the basis for correctly predicting memory performance in the larger group. Semantic proximity enabled a priori counterintuitive predictions of reverse age-related trends to be confirmed whenever the distance between representations of items in a target pair was greater for younger than for older children.

In the current study we examine the influence of child individual differences on children's and adults' behaviours in unstructured forensic interviews. Thirty-eight interviews conducted by actual forensic interviewers with 3-to 7-year-old children were analysed for child reporting behaviours (assent, denial, acquiescence, accurate and inaccurate details, verbosity and cooperation) and adult behaviours (leading vs. neutral questions). Consistent with our predictions, child individual differences that were visible (marked, e.g. sociability) more often predicted child and adult behaviours than those that were not as apparent (unmarked, e.g. source monitoring). In addition to direct influences of the child individual differences on child behaviours, for some variables the influence of the child individual difference was mediated by differential responses by an interviewer (i.e. indirect effects) which then, in turn, influence the child. The ability to examine indirect influences by using unstructured interviews is emphasized.

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Despite extensive research, questions underlying the nature and nurture of talent remain both numerous and diverse. In the current paper, we present an account that addresses 2 of the primary questions inspired by this debate: (a) the very existence of innate talents and (b) how exceptional abilities are developed. The development of exceptional performance is addressed through a synthesis of recent models that invoke multiplier effects to explain how differences in initial conditions (e.g., different levels of innate abilities), coupled with gene-environment interactions, determine ranges of phenotypic outcomes.