Mosing Miriam A, Pedersen Nancy L, Madison Guy, Ullén Fredrik
Department of Neuroscience, Karolinska Institutet, Stockholm, Sweden.
Department of Medical Epidemiology and Biostatistics, Karolinska Institutet, Stockholm, Sweden.
PLoS One. 2014 Nov 24;9(11):e113874. doi: 10.1371/journal.pone.0113874. eCollection 2014.
Musical aptitude is commonly measured using tasks that involve discrimination of different types of musical auditory stimuli. Performance on such different discrimination tasks correlates positively with each other and with intelligence. However, no study to date has explored these associations using a genetically informative sample to estimate underlying genetic and environmental influences. In the present study, a large sample of Swedish twins (N = 10,500) was used to investigate the genetic architecture of the associations between intelligence and performance on three musical auditory discrimination tasks (rhythm, melody and pitch). Phenotypic correlations between the tasks ranged between 0.23 and 0.42 (Pearson r values). Genetic modelling showed that the covariation between the variables could be explained by shared genetic influences. Neither shared, nor non-shared environment had a significant effect on the associations. Good fit was obtained with a two-factor model where one underlying shared genetic factor explained all the covariation between the musical discrimination tasks and IQ, and a second genetic factor explained variance exclusively shared among the discrimination tasks. The results suggest that positive correlations among musical aptitudes result from both genes with broad effects on cognition, and genes with potentially more specific influences on auditory functions.
音乐能力通常通过涉及区分不同类型音乐听觉刺激的任务来衡量。在这些不同的区分任务上的表现相互之间以及与智力都呈正相关。然而，迄今为止，尚无研究使用具有遗传信息的样本探讨这些关联，以估计潜在的遗传和环境影响。在本研究中，使用了一大样本瑞典双胞胎（N = 10,500）来研究智力与三种音乐听觉辨别任务（节奏、旋律和音高）表现之间关联的遗传结构。这些任务之间的表型相关性在0.23至0.42之间（皮尔逊r值）。遗传模型显示，变量之间的协变可以由共享的遗传影响来解释。共享环境和非共享环境对这些关联均无显著影响。使用双因素模型获得了良好的拟合，其中一个潜在的共享遗传因素解释了音乐辨别任务和智商之间的所有协变，另一个遗传因素仅解释了辨别任务之间共享的方差。结果表明，音乐能力之间的正相关既源于对认知有广泛影响的基因，也源于对听觉功能可能有更特定影响的基因。
