A new study shows that the ability to recognize faces is strongly genetic, which means that when you have that “wow, this person knows what brand of toothbrush I use and I have NO idea who they are” feeling it’s probably your parents fault. Skill at facial recognition is roughly seventy five percent or more inherited according to Wellesley College vision scientist Jeremy Wilmer, the lead scientist on the study.
Childhood environment does play a role, but the largest influence is inherited genetic traits. Science has suspected that facial recognition might be genetic for some time. Clusters of blood relatives who have trouble recognizing faces have been recorded for years. Bradley Duchaine of University College London, another member of the research team, points to a Las Vegas family that included eight members and four generations – and they all struggle to identify other people by their faces.
Wilmer and his team got their findings by studying sets of twins. Some identical, who share one hundred percent of their genetic code, and some fraternal, who only share about fifty percent. The twins were quizzed on their ability to remember faces (take the test here) – some people did no better having studied the faces than they would have if they had guessed completely at random without even looking at the pictures they were meant to study. Others passed with flying colors. The identical twins, in general, had similar scores. Fraternal twins were far less likely to have score closely together. A clear sign that facial recognition was tied to genetic make up.
The team double checked their results by having the twins take word memorization tests. Skill at memorizing words had no relationship to skill at identifying faces, which made it clear that the ability to recall faces has nothing to do with overall memory recall.
