Scientists at the University College London (UCL) were recently able to confirm that the innate human ability to recognize other people's face is something that is primarily determined by each individual's genetic makeup. The new investigation, which was conducted on twins, determined that identical siblings were far more likely to resemble each other in terms of their ability to recognize faces that fraternal twins. This suggests that genes the first group shares are responsible for dictating their proficiency at scanning and recognizing other people. Details of the study appear in the February 22 issue of the respected journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences,
ScienceDaily reports.
The same research was also able to determine that the neural mechanisms involved in recognizing faces are not the same as the ones involved in recognizing words, abstract art, or other things. “Face recognition is a skill that we depend on daily and considerable variability exists in the ability to recognize faces. Our results show that genetic differences are responsible for the great majority of the difference in face recognition ability between people,” says of the new conclusions UCL Institute of Cognitive Neuroscience expert Dr Brad Duchaine. He is also a coauthor of the PNAS paper.
In their experimental setup, the UCL investigators asked 164 identical twins (who have 100 percent of genes in common) and 125 non-identical twins (who share 50 percent of their genes) to take the Cambridge Face Memory Test. This investigation shows each participant a batch of six faces, which the participants need to learn. They are then asked to recognize the faces they saw from pictures showing them in different poses and lighting. According to the results, it would appear that identical twins had a correlation rate of 0.70, as opposed to the 0.29 recorded between fraternal twins.
“We are excited about this finding because the brain mechanisms carrying out face recognition are fairly well understood, meaning that the high heritability of face recognition could provide a good opportunity to connect genes to brain mechanisms and then to behavior,” Duchaine argues. In addition to this study, the UCL group also subjected the twins, and a larger number of non-twin individuals to the Cambridge measurement, and to two other tests, which referred to abstract art. It was discovered that no correlation existed between a person's ability to recognize faces and their ability to identify abstract art correctly.
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