Frontiers in Human Neuroscience (Dec 2020)

Neural and Genetic Bases for Human Ability Traits

  • Camila Bonin Pinto,
  • Camila Bonin Pinto,
  • Jannis Bielefeld,
  • Jannis Bielefeld,
  • Rami Jabakhanji,
  • Rami Jabakhanji,
  • Diane Reckziegel,
  • Diane Reckziegel,
  • James W. Griffith,
  • A. Vania Apkarian,
  • A. Vania Apkarian,
  • A. Vania Apkarian,
  • A. Vania Apkarian

DOI
https://doi.org/10.3389/fnhum.2020.609170
Journal volume & issue
Vol. 14

Abstract

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The judgement of human ability is ubiquitous, from school admissions to job performance reviews. The exact make-up of ability traits, however, is often narrowly defined and lacks a comprehensive basis. We attempt to simplify the spectrum of human ability, similar to how five personality traits are widely believed to describe most personalities. Finding such a basis for human ability would be invaluable since neuropsychiatric disease diagnoses and symptom severity are commonly related to such differences in performance. Here, we identified four underlying ability traits within the National Institutes of Health Toolbox normative data (n = 1, 369): (1) Motor-endurance, (2) Emotional processing, (3) Executive and cognitive function, and (4) Social interaction. We used the Human Connectome Project young adult dataset (n = 778) to show that Motor-endurance and Executive and cognitive function were reliably associated with specific brain functional networks (r2 = 0.305 ± 0.021), and the biological nature of these ability traits was also shown by calculating their heritability (31 and 49%, respectively) from twin data.

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