Sharing attention with interactive social partners, referred to as social attention ability, is an indispensable human ability underlying social interactions and appears to be severely compromised in autism spectrum disorder (ASD). The general consensus is that the impaired development of this fundamental ability is a cardinal feature of ASD and among the earliest and best predictors of this disorder. Yet to date, the origin of social attention ability, which is central to research on the etiology of ASD, remains little understood.
A research group led by Dr. JIANG Yi from State Key Laboratory of Brain and Cognitive Science, Institute of Psychology of Chinese Academy of Sciences demonstrates that social attention ability is highly heritable and hard-wired in the human brain. Using a classical twin design in conjunction with a modified central cueing paradigm, the researchers investigated the relative contributions of genetic and environmental influences on individual variation in the reflexive attentional orienting effects induced by social (i.e., eye gaze and walker’s walking direction) and non-social but behaviorally relevant (i.e., arrow) cues.
Figure 1. Illustrations of trial sequences in the walking direction cueing, eye gaze cueing, and arrow cueing tasks.
Results revealed that genetic factors significantly contributed to the two different types of social attention abilities, and shared genetic effects to a great extent could account for the covariation between them. By contrast, no evidence of heritability or genetic correlation was observed with non-social attention ability. More critically, one’s autistic traits could well predict the heritable aspects of social versus non-social attention abilities.
Figure 2. Genetic and environmental contributions to attention abilities and their phenotypic correlations.
The obtained results provide the first behavioral genetic evidence that social attention is unique and qualitatively distinct from attentional orienting triggered by non-social stimuli - the former is mediated by an innate and genetically determined module that can be shared across different social attention behaviors, while the latter reflects a more general attention mechanism and may occur as a result of long-term experience (e.g., overlearning). Moreover, genetic and environmental factors respectively account for the covariation between the two types of social attentional effects and that between the social and non-social attentional effects, further suggesting that the conventionally measured social attentional effect might conceivably involve two distinct (domain-specific and domain-general) attentional components. By showing the heritability of domain-specific (i.e., social) versus domain-general attention ability and its covariation with autistic-like tendency, they open up an avenue to probe and disentangle the core social attention ability in both ASD and the neurotypical population.
Taken together, these findings suggest that human social attention ability is supported by unique genetic mechanisms that are shared across different social, but not non-social, processing. Moreover, they highlight the critical role of human social attention ability in seeking the endophenotypes of social cognitive disorders including ASD.
This research was supported by grants from the National Natural Science Foundation of China, the Strategic Priority Research Program, the Key Research Program of Frontier Sciences, the Youth Innovation Promotion Association of the Chinese Academy of Sciences, and Beijing Municipal Science & Technology Commission.
This research is now published in Psychological Medicine.
Wang, L., Wang, Y., Xu, Q., Liu, D., Ji, H., Yu, Y., Hu, Z., Yuan, P., & Jiang, Y. (2020). Heritability of reflexive social attention triggered by eye gaze and walking direction: Common and unique genetic underpinnings. Psychological Medicine, 50(3), 475-483.
Contact
Ms.Chen LIU
Institute of Psychology
Email: liuc@psych.ac.cn
