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. 2023 Mar;53(2):85-100.
doi: 10.1007/s10519-022-10127-6. Epub 2022 Nov 15.

A General Cognitive Ability Factor for the UK Biobank

Camille Michèle Williams  1   2 , Ghislaine Labouret  3 , Tobias Wolfram  4 , Hugo Peyre  3   5   6 , Franck Ramus  3
Affiliations

A General Cognitive Ability Factor for the UK Biobank

Camille Michèle Williams et al. Behav Genet. 2023 Mar.

Abstract

UK Biobank participants do not have a high-quality measure of intelligence or polygenic scores (PGSs) of intelligence to simultaneously examine the genetic and neural underpinnings of intelligence. We created a standardized measure of general intelligence (g factor) relative to the UK population and estimated its quality. After running a GWAS of g on UK Biobank participants with a g factor of good quality and without neuroimaging data (N = 187,288), we derived a g PGS for UK Biobank participants with neuroimaging data. For individuals with at least one cognitive test, the g factor from eight cognitive tests (N = 501,650) explained 29% of the variance in cognitive test performance. The PGS for British individuals with neuroimaging data (N = 27,174) explained 7.6% of the variance in g. We provided high-quality g factor estimates for most UK Biobank participants and g factor PGSs for UK Biobank participants with neuroimaging data.

Keywords: Factor analyses; GWAS; Intelligence; Polygenic scores; UK Biobank.

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