Twin studies have proven invaluable for teasing out the effects of both genetics and the environment on human biology. In a study published in Cell Reports, researchers studied pairs of twins to look at how the interplay of genetics and environment affect cognitive processing—the way that people think. They found that some cognitive abilities appear to be regulated more by environmental factors than by genetics.
“Past research has suggested that general intelligence—often referred to as intelligence quotient or IQ—has a heritability ranging from 50% to 80%,” says senior and corresponding author. “Our study may be the first to demonstrate that a different kind of cognitive ability, known as metacognition and mentalizing, might be much more influenced by environment.”
Cognitive functions such as perception, attention, memory, language, and planning are considered to be the basis for general intelligence. These functions regulate the way that people organize and process new information. By contrast, metacognition looks at how well people understand and control their cognitive processes.
Metacognition is important for developing learning strategies and is believed to be a predictor of an individual’s successes in school and social achievements. Mentalizing describes the process of recognizing and understanding mental states like emotions and attitudes, both in ourselves and in other people.
For this research, the investigators recruited 57 pairs of adult monozygotic (identical) twins and 48 pairs of dizygotic (fraternal) twins from the Beijing Twin Study (BeTwiSt). This is an ongoing, long-term study established in 2006 that includes extensive data like brain images and psychological surveys, as well as genetic information, on pairs of twins.
The twins were asked to perform tasks related to metacognition. These tasks consisted of watching a cluster of moving dots on a screen and making a perceptual judgement on the net direction of the dots. They were also asked to rate their confidence about their decisions. To measure mentalizing, the participants were asked to evaluate a partner’s confidence in their decision-making abilities.
The investigators found that pairs of twins who had parents with higher levels of education and higher family incomes have similar results to each other, regardless of whether they were identical or fraternal. These observations suggested that familial environment was more likely to influence metacognitive abilities than genetics.
“Our findings were outside our expectations,” the author says. “Decades of extensive research utilizing the classical twin paradigm have consistently demonstrated the heritability of nearly all cognitive abilities so far investigated. Our findings emphasize that these shared family environmental factors, such as parental nurturing and the transmission of cultural values, likely play a significant role in shaping the mental state representations in metacognition and mentalizing.”
The researchers acknowledge that there are limitations to this research and that many more studies are needed. They plan to continue their research in this area, including using population studies to further investigate what kind of specific parental nurturing factors and sociocultural values affect individuals’ metacognitive and mentalizing abilities.
https://www.cell.com/cell-reports/fulltext/S2211-1247(24)00388-7
Latest News
AI to analyze clumping prot…
By newseditor
Posted 26 May
Reversible, non-hormonal ma…
By newseditor
Posted 26 May
Dissection of the schizophr…
By newseditor
Posted 26 May
Protease action on controll…
By newseditor
Posted 25 May
Maternal inflammation activ…
By newseditor
Posted 25 May
Other Top Stories
Decreased performance under pressure!
Read more
What's the cost of self-control?
Read more
Exercise hormone is a key regulator of cognitive function
Read more
New reward circuitry discovered!
Read more
Nonnative speech learning involves a wide array of changes in neura…
Read more
Protocols
SEMORE: SEgmentation and MO…
By newseditor
Posted 26 May
Spatially resolved lipidomi…
By newseditor
Posted 24 May
Efficient expansion and CRI…
By newseditor
Posted 21 May
Massively parallel in vivo…
By newseditor
Posted 20 May
Breast cancer-on-chip for p…
By newseditor
Posted 16 May
Publications
The thalamic reticular nucl…
By newseditor
Posted 26 May
PMI-controlled mannose meta…
By newseditor
Posted 26 May
Protein-membrane interactio…
By newseditor
Posted 26 May
Toward an interventional sc…
By newseditor
Posted 26 May
Cryo-EM reveals that iRhom2…
By newseditor
Posted 25 May
Presentations
Hydrogels in Drug Delivery
By newseditor
Posted 12 Apr
Lipids
By newseditor
Posted 31 Dec
Cell biology of carbohydrat…
By newseditor
Posted 29 Nov
RNA interference (RNAi)
By newseditor
Posted 23 Oct
RNA structure and functions
By newseditor
Posted 19 Oct
Posters
A chemical biology/modular…
By newseditor
Posted 22 Aug
Single-molecule covalent ma…
By newseditor
Posted 04 Jul
ASCO-2020-HEALTH SERVICES R…
By newseditor
Posted 23 Mar
ASCO-2020-HEAD AND NECK CANCER
By newseditor
Posted 23 Mar
ASCO-2020-GENITOURINARY CAN…
By newseditor
Posted 23 Mar