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.
Stylized structural diagram of oxytocin (DARPA).
Senior author Dr Larry Young of Emory University and his colleagues point out the implication that oxytocin plays an important role in promoting our ability to recognize one another, yet about one-third of the population possesses only the genetic variant that negatively impacts that ability.
“This finding may help explain why a few people remember almost everyone they have met while others have difficulty recognizing members of their own family,” Dr Young said.
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. They examined the influence of subtle differences in OXTR structure on face memory competence in the parents, non-autistic siblings and autistic child, and discovered a single change in the DNA of the oxytocin receptor had a big impact on face memory skills in the families.
“This finding implies that oxytocin likely plays an important role more generally in social information processing, which is disrupted in disorders such as autism,” Dr Young explained.
Additionally, the study is remarkable for its evolutionary aspect. Rodents use odors for social recognition while humans use visual facial cues. This suggests an ancient conservation in genetic and neural architectures involved in social information processing that transcends the sensory modalities used from mouse to man.
“The team will continue working together to pursue strategies for improving social cognition in psychiatric disorders based on the current findings,” Dr Young concluded.
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Skuse DH et al. Common polymorphism in the oxytocin receptor gene (OXTR) is associated with human social recognition skills. PNAS, published online December 23, 2013; doi: 10.1073/pnas.1302985111
