Mathias Samuel R, Knowles Emma E M, Mollon Josephine, Rodrigue Amanda L, Woolsey Mary K, Hernandez Alyssa M, Garret Amy S, Fox Peter T, Olvera Rene L, Peralta Juan M, Kumar Satish, Göring Harald H H, Duggirala Ravi, Curran Joanne E, Blangero John, Glahn David C
Department of Psychiatry, Boston Children's Hospital, Boston, MA, United States.
Harvard Medical School, Boston, MA, United States.
Front Neurol. 2023 Mar 9;14:1071766. doi: 10.3389/fneur.2023.1071766. eCollection 2023.
The cocktail-party problem refers to the difficulty listeners face when trying to attend to relevant sounds that are mixed with irrelevant ones. Previous studies have shown that solving these problems relies on perceptual as well as cognitive processes. Previously, we showed that speech-reception thresholds (SRTs) on a cocktail-party listening task were influenced by genetic factors. Here, we estimated the degree to which these genetic factors overlapped with those influencing cognitive abilities.
We measured SRTs and hearing thresholds (HTs) in 493 listeners, who ranged in age from 18 to 91 years old. The same individuals completed a cognitive test battery comprising 18 measures of various cognitive domains. Individuals belonged to large extended pedigrees, which allowed us to use variance component models to estimate the narrow-sense heritability of each trait, followed by phenotypic and genetic correlations between pairs of traits.
All traits were heritable. The phenotypic and genetic correlations between SRTs and HTs were modest, and only the phenotypic correlation was significant. By contrast, all genetic SRT-cognition correlations were strong and significantly different from 0. For some of these genetic correlations, the hypothesis of complete pleiotropy could not be rejected.
Overall, the results suggest that there was substantial genetic overlap between SRTs and a wide range of cognitive abilities, including abilities without a major auditory or verbal component. The findings highlight the important, yet sometimes overlooked, contribution of higher-order processes to solving the cocktail-party problem, raising an important caveat for future studies aiming to identify specific genetic factors that influence cocktail-party listening.
鸡尾酒会问题是指听众在试图专注于与无关声音混合在一起的相关声音时所面临的困难。先前的研究表明，解决这些问题依赖于感知和认知过程。此前，我们发现鸡尾酒会听力任务中的言语接受阈值（SRT）受遗传因素影响。在此，我们估计了这些遗传因素与影响认知能力的遗传因素的重叠程度。
我们测量了493名年龄在18岁至91岁之间的听众的SRT和听力阈值（HT）。这些个体完成了一套认知测试，包括对各个认知领域的18项测量。个体属于大型扩展家系，这使我们能够使用方差成分模型来估计每个性状的狭义遗传力，随后估计成对性状之间的表型和遗传相关性。
所有性状都是可遗传的。SRT和HT之间的表型和遗传相关性适中，只有表型相关性显著。相比之下，所有SRT与认知的遗传相关性都很强，且显著不同于零。对于其中一些遗传相关性，完全多效性的假设不能被拒绝。
总体而言，结果表明SRT与广泛的认知能力之间存在大量遗传重叠，包括那些没有主要听觉或语言成分的能力。这些发现凸显了高阶过程对解决鸡尾酒会问题的重要但有时被忽视的贡献，这为未来旨在确定影响鸡尾酒会听力的特定遗传因素的研究提出了重要警示。
