Association of Cognition Performance and Genetic Variance of DRD2 Taq1A for Science and Art Stream Students

The study aims to investigate on the association between cognitive performance and genetic variance of DRD2 for the student with different educational background. A total of 77 subjects were recruited with 37 art students and 40 science students. The subjects were required to carry out a cognitive test and blood sample is collected for genetic variance test. Written consent was obtained before the data collection. Genomic DNA was extracted from the blood for PCR. Genotype results revealed that both art and science groups have a similar allelic frequency which indicates that gene does not affect educational preference. The performance of the MCCB cognitive test was analyzed and it did not differ significantly in both groups. Thus, the study result suggested that educational background will not affect the cognitive performance. In addition, there was no significant association between gene and cognitive performance for subjects from different educational background. However, there was a strong positive correlation between the cognition performance of reasoning and problem solving and speed of processing.