Oxytocin Receptor Gene Influences Face Recognition, Study Shows

From Sci News (12/28):

Oxytocin Receptor Gene Influences Face Recognition, Study Shows


OXTR (oxytocin receptor) – a gene that influences a range of social interactions including mother-infant bonding – also plays a key role in our ability to recognize faces, according to a new study reported in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences....

The scientists studied 198 families with a single autistic child because these families were known to show a wide range of variability in facial recognition skills; two-thirds of the families were from the United Kingdom, and the remainder from Finland.

They previously found OXTR 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....

http://www.sci-news.com/genetics/science-oxytocin-receptor-gene-face-recognition-01647.html