Exploring the genetics of normal human cognitive variation

While extensive efforts continue to be made to understand the genetics of human diseases, there has been much less serious effort dedicated to understanding the genetic bases of traits comprising everyday differences among healthy individuals, many of which are of great interest biologically and have the potential to further our understanding of diseases. We have administered a standard cognitive battery to more than 2,200 healthy volunteers and assessed more than 600 participants for their night visual acuity, face recognition ability, time perception, contagious yawn susceptibility, and auditory pitch discrimination; these are all traits that are relevant to disease, fairly easy to measure and involve neuronal processes. We are exploring different genetic methods to identify variants influencing these traits, including GWAS, targeted genotyping and sequencing, and complete genome and exome sequencing. Our work provides a novel viewpoint into the biology underlying human diseases and the genetic architecture of human traits.