Why do we differ in our ability to recognise faces?

Differences in people’s ability to recognise faces is substantially heritable according to a new study from the Institute of Psychiatry, Psychology & Neuroscience (IoPPN) at King’s College London.

The research, published in PNAS, also suggests that face recognition only modestly correlated with intelligence and that almost all of the genetic influence on face recognition was specific to it (rather than shared with intelligence).

Nicholas Shakeshaft, the study's first author from the IoPPN, discusses the findings and their implications.