Protocol and preregistration for the CODEC project: measuring, modelling and mechanistically understanding the nature of cognitive variability in early childhood.

Background: Children's cognitive performance fluctuates across multiple timescales. However, fluctuations have often been neglected in favour of research into average cognitive performance, limiting the unique insights into cognitive abilities and development that cognitive variability may afford. Preliminary evidence suggests that greater variability is associated with increased symptoms of neurodevelopmental disorders, and differences in behavioural and neural functioning.

Environment and culture shape both the colour lexicon and the genetics of colour perception.

Many languages express 'blue' and 'green' under an umbrella term 'grue'. To explain this variation, it has been suggested that changes in eye physiology, due to UV-light incidence, can lead to abnormalities in blue-green color perception which causes the color lexicon to adapt. Here, we apply advanced statistics on a set of 142 populations to model how different factors shape the presence of a specific term for blue.