NEW YORK (GenomeWeb) – The Wyss Institute for Biologically Inspired Engineering and the Harvard Medical School Personal Genome Project today launched a collaboration with Lumos Labs — the manufacturer of the "brain training" program Lumosity — to investigate the genetics of memory, attention, and reaction speed.
The collaboration will recruit 10,000 individuals from the PGP who will be assayed using a set of online cognitive tests from Lumos' NeuroCognitive Performance Test to evaluate memory functions, including ability to recall objects, memorize object patterns, and response times.
The researchers plan to correlate extremely high performance scores with naturally-occurring variations in the participants' genomes.
"The Wyss Institute's extraordinary scientific program and the Personal Genome Project's commitment to research that is both pioneering and responsible make them ideal collaborators," Bob Schafer, Lumos' director of research, said in a statement. "Combining Lumosity's potential as a research tool could help us learn more about how our online assessment can help power innovative, large-scale studies."