At the end of World War II, a severe 5-mo famine struck the cities in the western part of The Netherlands. At its peak, the rations dropped to as low as 400 calories per day. In 1972, cognitive performance in 19-y-old male conscripts was reported not to have been affected by exposure to the famine before birth. In the present study, we show that cognitive function in later life does seem affected by prenatal undernutrition. We found that at age 56 to 59, men and women exposed to famine during the early stage of gestation performed worse on a selective attention task, a cognitive ability that usually declines with increasing age. We hypothesize that this decline may be an early manifestation of an accelerated cognitive aging process.

The influence of estimated intelligence (group assessment of WAIS-R S) on sex differences in face recognition, as well as verbal and non-verbal episodic memory tasks was examined in 99 women and 88 men between 20 and 40 years of age. Results showed that men performed at a higher level than women on the WAIS-R S subtest Information, whereas the opposite was true for Digit symbol. Women performed at a higher level than men on the verbal episodic memory tasks and on face recognition, but there were no sex differences on the non-verbal episodic memory task. Estimated intelligence for both men and women was positively associated with most episodic memory measures, the exception being face recognition in women. In face recognition, there was no association to estimated intelligence, suggesting that face recognition performance in women is unrelated to several basic cognitive processes.