RT Journal Article
SR Electronic
T1 Archetypes in human behavior and their brain correlates: An evolutionary trade-off approach
JF bioRxiv
FD Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory
SP 325803
DO 10.1101/325803
A1 Cona, Giorgia
A1 Koçillari, Loren
A1 Palombit, Alessandro
A1 Bertoldo, Alessandra
A1 Maritan, Amos
A1 Corbetta, Maurizio
YR 2018
UL http://biorxiv.org/content/early/2018/05/18/325803.abstract
AB Organisms perform multiple tasks and in doing so face critical trade-offs. According to Pareto optimality theory, such trade-offs lead to the evolution of phenotypes that are distributed in a portion of the trait-space resembling a polytope, whose vertices represent the specialists at one of the traits (archetypes).We applied this theory to the variability of cognitive and behavioral scores measured in 1206 individuals from the Human Connectome Project. Among all possible 300 combinations of pairs of traits, we found the best fit to Pareto optimality when individuals were plotted in the trait-space of time preferences for reward, evaluated with the Delay Discounting task. This task requires choosing either immediate smaller rewards or delayed larger rewards. Time preference for reward identified three archetypes, which accounted for variability on many cognitive, personality, and socio-economic status scores, differences in brain structure, as well as in functional connectivity between prefrontal cortex, basal ganglia, and amygdala, regions associated with reward and their regulation. There was only a weak association with genetics. In summary, time preference for reward reflects a core variable that biases human phenotypes via natural and cultural selection.