By the time your baby starts staring blankly at a ball or babbling incoherently, their brain might already be dropping clues about the kind of adult they’re going to grow into. Well, cognitively speaking, at least.

According to a new study published in PNAS and led by researchers from the University of Colorado Boulder, certain behaviors in babies as young as seven months old can help predict how they’ll score on intelligence tests thirty years later.

This isn’t to say your child’s future is carved in stone before they even learn object permanence. As lead author Daniel Gustavson says, cognition isn’t fixed in infancy, but there are certain signs that crop up in early development that can give us a pretty good idea of how things will unfold from there.

The study used decades of data from the Colorado Longitudinal Twin Study, a massive project that had been tracking over 1,000 twins since 1985, to help us better understand the distinction between nature and nurture.

Researchers focused on a couple of specific baby behaviors: object novelty (how interested a baby is in new things) and task orientation (how long they stay focused). It turns out, babies who were more curious and focused tended to grow up to score higher on adult IQ tests.

So, if your infant is more into exploring new toys than endlessly chewing on their blanky, it could be a good sign that they’re not going to be a dumb adult.

Here’s where the whole “nature versus nurture” part of it comes into play. By comparing identical and fraternal twins, the study estimated that about 22 percent of adult cognitive ability could be traced to genetic influences present by age three. But around 10 percent of the variation in adult smarts came from environmental factors when the children were just one or two years old. That means that what happens to people in their earliest stages of development can echo on through their lives for decades.

We’re already being introduced to things like an app designed to give parents the power to create genetically superior babies. Rich parents willing to toss fate aside can alter their baby’s future based on whatever information they can gather about its present. They may not understand the nuances of the study, like how intelligence is a cocktail of genetics and environment, and only focus on the “if they’re not doing X by X months old, they’re going to be a dumbass 45-year-old.”