State Key Laboratory of Brain and Cognitive Science, CAS Center for Excellence in Brain Science and Intelligence Technology, Institute of Psychology, Chinese Academy of Sciences, Beijing, China 100101.
Department of Psychology, University of Chinese Academy of Sciences, Beijing, China 100049.
Proc Natl Acad Sci U S A. 2018 Feb 20;115(8):1937-1942. doi: 10.1073/pnas.1714655115. Epub 2018 Jan 22.
The ability to detect biological motion (BM) and decipher the meaning therein is essential to human survival and social interaction. However, at the individual level, we are not equally equipped with this ability. In particular, impaired BM perception and abnormal neural responses to BM have been observed in autism spectrum disorder (ASD), a highly heritable neurodevelopmental disorder characterized by devastating social deficits. Here, we examined the underlying sources of individual differences in two abilities fundamental to BM perception (i.e., the abilities to process local kinematic and global configurational information of BM) and explored whether BM perception shares a common genetic origin with autistic traits. Using the classical twin method, we found reliable genetic influences on BM perception and revealed a clear dissociation between its two components-whereas genes account for about 50% of the individual variation in local BM processing, global BM processing is largely shaped by environment. Critically, participants' sensitivity to local BM cues was negatively correlated with their autistic traits through the dimension of social communication, with the covariation largely mediated by shared genetic effects. These findings demonstrate that the ability to process BM, especially with regard to its inherent kinetics, is heritable. They also advance our understanding of the sources of the linkage between autistic symptoms and BM perception deficits, opening up the possibility of treating the ability to process local BM information as a distinct hallmark of social cognition.
人类生存和社会互动的关键是具备检测生物运动（BM）并理解其中含义的能力。然而，在个体层面上，我们并不具备同等的能力。特别是在自闭症谱系障碍（ASD）中，人们观察到生物运动感知受损以及对生物运动的神经反应异常，这是一种高度遗传性的神经发育障碍，其特征是严重的社交缺陷。在这里，我们研究了两种基本的生物运动感知能力（即处理生物运动局部运动学和全局构型信息的能力）个体差异的潜在来源，并探讨了生物运动感知是否与自闭症特征具有共同的遗传起源。我们使用经典的双胞胎方法发现，生物运动感知存在可靠的遗传影响，并揭示了其两个组成部分之间的明显分离-尽管基因解释了局部生物运动处理个体差异的约 50%，但全局生物运动处理主要由环境塑造。至关重要的是，参与者对局部生物运动线索的敏感性与其自闭症特征中的社交沟通维度呈负相关，这种共变主要是由共同的遗传效应介导的。这些发现表明，处理生物运动的能力，特别是其内在动力学，是可遗传的。它们还增进了我们对自闭症症状和生物运动感知缺陷之间联系的来源的理解，为将处理局部生物运动信息的能力作为社会认知的独特标志来治疗提供了可能性。
