Shared genetic aetiology between cognitive performance and brain activations in language and math tasks

Abstract

Corresponding authors' information:Emails: yann.leguen@cea.fr (YLG), vincent.frouin@cea.fr (VF) 2 Cognitive performance is highly heritable. However, little is known about common genetic influences on cognitive ability and brain activation when engaged in a cognitive task. The Human Connectome Project (HCP) offers a unique opportunity to study this shared genetic etiology with an extended pedigree of 785 individuals. To investigate this common genetic origin, we took advantage of the HCP dataset, which includes both language and mathematics activation tasks. Using the HCP multimodal parcellation, we identified areals in which interindividual functional MRI (fMRI) activation variance was significantly explained by genetics.Then, we performed bivariate genetic analyses between the neural activations and behavioral scores, corresponding to the fMRI task accuracies, fluid intelligence, working memory and language performance. We observed that several parts of the language network along the superior temporal sulcus, as well as the angular gyrus belonging to the math processing network, are significantly genetically correlated with these indicators of cognitive performance. This shared genetic etiology provides insights into the brain areas where the human-specific genetic repertoire is expressed. Studying the association of polygenic risk scores, using variants associated with human cognitive ability and brain activation, would provide an opportunity to better understand where these variants are influential.

Subtypes of brain activation are heritable and genetically linked with behavior in the Human Connectome Project sample

“…Their results are close to our findings, since we also reduced dimensionality of our data and found 13 latent variables (out of 74 measures) and found heritability that ranged from 0.2 to 0.8. In-scanner task performance heritability estimates were also consistent with studies that used the same HCP data (Babajani-Feremi, 2017;Le Guen et al, 2018) .…”

Gene Expression Correlates of the Cortical Network Underlying Sentence Processing

“…Here we will focus on the quintessential and human-unique capacity for language. Previous studies have suggested that language-related cognitive performance is highly heritable (e.g., (Dale et al, 1998;Guen, Amalric, Pinel, Pallier, & Frouin, 2018;Newbury, Bishop, & Monaco, 2005)), and that brain activations associated with semantic comprehension tasks are also heritable (Guen et al, 2018). Moreover, genetic factors also play a substantial role in susceptibility to languagerelated neurodevelopmental disorders such as childhood apraxia of speech (Eising et al, 2018), developmental language disorder (specific language impairment) and developmental dyslexia (Deriziotis & Fisher, 2017).…”

Atypical language network lateralization is reflected throughout the macroscale functional organization of cortex

“…The genetic origin of language capacities 93 and other properties of hemispheric specialization reflect a fundamental question in cognitive neuroscience with clear relevance for the study of both health and disease 12 . Prior work indicates that intrinsic connectivity between language related regions 94 , as well as evoked brain activations during language tasks 95 , are heritable. Our present analyses indicate a clear genetic basis for population-level patterns of language lateralization and corresponding features of cortical organization.…”