Heritability of Stroop and flanker performance in 12-year old children

Abstract

Background: There is great interest in appropriate phenotypes that serve as indicator of genetically transmitted frontal (dys)function, such as ADHD. Here we investigate the ability to deal with response conflict, and we ask to what extent performance variation on response interference tasks is caused by genetic variation. We tested a large sample of 12-year old monozygotic and dizygotic twins on two well-known and closely related response interference tasks; the color Stroop task and the Eriksen flanker task. Using structural equation modelling we assessed the heritability of several performance indices derived from those tasks.

Results: In the Stroop task we found high heritabilities of overall reaction time and - more important - Stroop interference (h2 = nearly 50 %). In contrast, we found little evidence of heritability on flanker performance. For both tasks no effects of sex on performance variation were found.

Conclusions: These results suggest that normal variation in Stroop performance is influenced by underlying genetic variation. Given that Stroop performance is often hampered not only in people suffering from frontal dysfunction, but also in their unaffected relatives, we conclude that this variable may constitute a suitable endophenotype for future genetic studies. We discuss several reasons for the absence of genetic effects on the flanker task.

Figure 1

A path diagram of a univariate ACE model A path diagram of a univariate ACE model (A = Additive genetic factors, C = shared of common environmental factors, E = nonshared environmental effects) in which the three latent independent variables influence variation (indicated by single headed arrows) in a particular behavior or phenotype (P; P1 for twin 1 and P2 for twin 2). MZ = monozygotic; DZ = dizygotic. Partial regression coefficients (letters a, c and e) reflect the degree of relationship between the latent variables and the phenotype. Double headed arrows indicate the correlations among variables.