A gene known to influence mother-infant bonding also plays a special role in the ability to remember faces, scientists have found.
The study is the first to demonstrate that variation in the oxytocin receptor gene influences face recognition skills.
While oxytocin plays an important role in promoting our ability to recognise one another, about one-third of the population possesses only the genetic variant that negatively impacts that ability, researchers said.
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They said this finding may help explain why a few people remember almost everyone they have met while others have difficulty recognising members of their own family.
The study, by researchers from Yerkes National Primate Research Center at Emory University in Atlanta, the University College London in the United Kingdom and University of Tampere in Finland studied 198 families with a single autistic child.
These families were known to show a wide range of variability in facial recognition skills; two-thirds of the families were from the UK, and the remainder from Finland.
The Emory researchers previously found the oxytocin receptor is essential for olfactory-based social recognition in rodents, like mice and voles, and wondered whether the same gene could also be involved in human face recognition.
They examined the influence of subtle differences in oxytocin receptor gene structure on face memory competence in the parents, non-autistic siblings and autistic child, and discovered a single change in the DNA of the oxytocin receptor had a big impact on face memory skills in the families.
According to study author Larry Young, of Yerkes, the Department of Psychiatry in Emory's School of Medicine and Emory's Center for Translational Social Neuroscience (CTSN), this finding implies that oxytocin likely plays an important role more generally in social information processing, which is disrupted in disorders such as autism.
Additionally, this study is remarkable for its evolutionary aspect. Rodents use odours for social recognition while humans use visual facial cues, researchers said.
This suggests an ancient conservation in genetic and neural architectures involved in social information processing that transcends the sensory modalities used from mouse to man.
The study will be published in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.
