Why do some people recognize faces easily and others frequently make mistakes in recognizing faces? Classic behavioral work has shown that faces are processed in a distinctive holistic manner that is unlike the processing of objects. In the study reported here, we investigated whether individual differences in holistic face processing have a significant influence on face recognition. We found that the magnitude of face-specific recognition accuracy correlated with the extent to which participants processed faces holistically, as indexed by the composite-face effect and the whole-part effect. This association is due to face-specific processing in particular, not to a more general aspect of cognitive processing, such as general intelligence or global attention. This finding provides constraints on computational models of face recognition and may elucidate mechanisms underlying cognitive disorders, such as prosopagnosia and autism, that are associated with deficits in face recognition.

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.

In daily life, one of the most common social tasks we perform is to recognize faces. However, the relation between face recognition ability and social activities is largely unknown. Here we ask whether individuals with better social skills are also better at recognizing faces. We found that extraverts who have better social skills correctly recognized more faces than introverts. However, this advantage was absent when extraverts were asked to recognize non-social stimuli (e.g., flowers). In particular, the underlying facet that makes extraverts better face recognizers is the gregariousness facet that measures the degree of inter-personal interaction. In addition, the link between extraversion and face recognition ability was independent of general cognitive abilities. These findings provide the first evidence that links face recognition ability to our daily activity in social communication, supporting the hypothesis that extraverts are better at decoding social information than introverts.

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