Heritability of the Specific Cognitive Ability of Face Perception
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Author(s)
Zhu, Qi
Song, Yiying
Hu, Siyuan
Li, Xiaobai
Tian, Moqian
Zhen, Zonglei
Dong, Qi
Kanwisher, Nancy
Liu, Jia
Date Issued
January 2010
Journal
Current Biology
Publisher
Elsevier Ltd.
Citation
Zhu, Qi et al. “Heritability of the Specific Cognitive Ability of Face Perception.” Current Biology 20.2 (2010): 137–142.
Version
Author's final manuscript
Abstract
What makes one person socially insightful but mathematically challenged, and another musically gifted yet devoid of a sense of direction? Individual differences in general cognitive ability are thought to be mediated by “generalist genes” that affect many cognitive abilities similarly without specific genetic influences on particular cognitive abilities [1]. In contrast, we present here evidence for cognitive “specialist genes”: monozygotic twins are more similar than dizygotic twins in the specific cognitive ability of face perception. Each of three measures of face-specific processing was heritable, i.e., more correlated in monozygotic than dizygotic twins: face-specific recognition ability, the face-inversion effect [2], and the composite-face effect [3]. Crucially, this effect is due to the heritability of face processing in particular, not to a more general aspect of cognition such as IQ or global attention. Thus, individual differences in at least one specific mental talent are independently heritable. This finding raises the question of what other specific cognitive abilities are independently heritable and may elucidate the mechanisms by which heritable disorders like dyslexia and autism can have highly uneven cognitive profiles in which some mental processes can be selectively impaired while others remain unaffected or even selectively enhanced.
MIT Department
Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Department of Brain and Cognitive Sciences
McGovern Institute for Brain Research at MIT
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Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 3.0
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DOI of Published Version
https://doi.org/10.1016/j.cub.2009.11.067
