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

Yann Le Guen (1, 2) , Marie Amalric (3) , Philippe Pinel (3) , Christophe Pallier (3) , Vincent Frouin (2)

1 UNATI - Unité Analyse et Traitement de l'Information
2 NEUROSPIN - Service NEUROSPIN
3 UNICOG-U992 - Neuroimagerie cognitive - Psychologie cognitive expérimentale

Cognitive performance is highly heritable. However, little is known about common genetic infuences on cognitive ability and brain activation when engaged in a cognitive task. The Human Connectome Project (HCP) ofers 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 identifed areals in which inter-individual functional MRI (fMRI) activation variance was signifcantly explained by genetics. Then, we performed bivariate genetic analyses between the neural activations and behavioral scores, corresponding to the fMRI task accuracies, fuid 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 signifcantly genetically correlated with these indicators of cognitive performance. This shared genetic etiology provides insights into the brain areas where the human-specifc 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 infuentia

Domains: Imaging; Bioinformatics [q-bio.QM]; Populations and Evolution [q-bio.PE]; Nuclear medicine; Machine Learning [stat.ML]

Yann Le Guen, Marie Amalric, Philippe Pinel, Christophe Pallier, Vincent Frouin. Shared genetic aetiology between cognitive performance and brain activations in language and math tasks. Scientific Reports, 2018, 8, pp.17624. ⟨10.1038/s41598-018-35665-0⟩. ⟨cea-01944702⟩