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Language, tools, body parts, and faces: A neural genetic investigation
Poster D25 in Poster Session D, Wednesday, October 25, 4:45 - 6:30 pm CEST, Espace Vieux-Port
Haojie Wen1, Yanchao Bi1,2; 1Beijing Normal University, Beijing, China, 2Chinese Institute for Brain Research, Beijing, China
Language plays an essential role in the evolution of homo sapiens, serving as a foundation for thinking and communication. Such ability is supported by a widely distributed brain network encompassing the temporal, parietal and frontal regions. Inspired by the various hypotheses that language evolution was related to the processes of using tools, gesturing, or social interactions, we investigated whether and how the neural correlates supporting these processes have shared genetic components. To this end we took advantage of the Human Connectome Project (HCP) dataset which had fMRI data with monozygotic twins and dizygotic twins performing tasks processing language and three types of objects associating with tool, gesture, and social information. First, the brain areas activated by language and showing genetic effects was obtained using the language task (listening to stories) twin dataset (342 subjects, 113 pairs of monozygotic twins and 58 pairs of dizygotic twins). Six language clusters that showed significant genetic effects were found, including the bilateral anterior temporal lobe, the left superior temporal gyrus, the right superior temporal gyrus, the bilateral primary auditory cortex, the left frontal-parietal cortex, and the bilateral dorsal caudate. The HCP working memory task twin dataset (334 subjects, 106 pairs of monozygotic twins and 61 pairs of dizygotic twins) that included pictures of tools, body parts, and faces was then used to examine whether the language genetic clusters also showed genetic effects in terms of brain sensitivity to these domains (body parts approximating gesture processing and face social processing, with place as a control condition). The results showed different language genetic clusters’ responses to different domains were genetically influenced: the bilateral dorsal caudate regions’ responses to both tools and body parts; the right superior temporal gyrus to tools were genetically influenced; the bilateral anterior temporal cortex to body parts. Further common path model analysis confirmed the shared genetic effects across language, tool, and body parts processing in the bilateral dorsal caudate and between language and tool processing in the right superior temporal gyrus. Using gene expression data in the Allen Brain datasets and SVM classification approach we found that the language genetic clusters had distinct genetic profiles compared to the rest of the brain, and also differed from each other. Taken together, these results uncover the complex genetic patterns of language neural processes, shedding light on the evolution of language and its shared origins with other cognitive capacities.
Topic Areas: Meaning: Lexical Semantics, Genetics