Assessing Reliability, Heritability and General Cognitive Ability in a Battery of Cognitive Tasks for Laboratory Mice

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• 作者：Michael J. Galsworthy ; Jose L. Paya-Cano ; Lin Liu ; Santiago Monle¨®n ; Gregory Gregoryan ; Cathy Fernandes ; Leonard C. Schalkwyk and Robert Plomin
• 关键词：Factor analysis ; g ; general cognitive ability ; heritability ; HS mice ; individual differences ; siblings
• 刊名：Behavior Genetics
• 出版年：2005
• 出版时间：2005
• 年：2005
• 卷：35
• 期：5
• 页码：675-692
• 全文大小：463 KB

文摘

This report includes the first sibling study of mouse behavior, and presents evidence for a heritable general cognitive ability (g) factor influencing cognitive batteries. Data from a population of male and female outbred mice (n = 84), and a replication study of male sibling pairs (n = 167) are reported. Arenas employed were the T-maze, the Morris water maze, the puzzle box, the Hebb–Williams maze, object exploration, a water plus-maze, and a second food-puzzle arena. The results show a factor structure consistent with the presence of g in mice. Employing one score per arena, this factor accounts for 41 % of the variance in the first study (or 36 % after sex regression) and 23 % in the second, where this factor also showed sibling correlations of 0.17–0.21, which translates into an upper-limit heritability estimate of around 40 % . Reliabilities of many tasks are low and consequently set an even lower ceiling for inter-arena or sibling correlations. Nevertheless, the factor structure is seen to remain fairly robust across permutations of the battery composition and the current findings fit well with other recent studies.