Compared with notable successes in the genetics of basic sensory transduction, progress on the genetics of higher level perception and cognition has been limited. We propose that investigating specific cognitive abilities with well-defined neural substrates, such as face recognition, may yield additional insights. In a twin study of face recognition, we found that the correlation of scores between monozygotic twins (0.70) was more than double the dizygotic twin correlation (0.29), evidence for a high genetic contribution to face recognition ability. Low correlations between face recognition scores and visual and verbal recognition scores indicate that both face recognition ability itself and its genetic basis are largely attributable to face-specific mechanisms. The present results therefore identify an unusual phenomenon: a highly specific cognitive ability that is highly heritable. Our results establish a clear genetic basis for face recognition, opening this intensively studied and socially advantageous cognitive trait to genetic investigation.behavioral genetic | face recognition | individual differences | specialist gene | generalist gene G eneral intelligence, or g, has received great attention in both quantitative genetic and molecular genetic studies of cognition (1). Strong heritability is shown by g, and neurobiological correlates of g have been identified (1-4). However, molecular studies searching for genetic correlates of g have only found chromosomal regions with very small effects (5), and studies identifying candidate genes often fail to replicate (6). On the other hand, recent studies investigating reading and spoken language, abilities that rely on more specific cognitive and neural mechanisms, have identified major contributing genes (7,8). Thus, at least some specific abilities appear relatively tractable to genetic investigation, and it is plausible that abilities involving fewer cognitive and neural mechanisms may generally depend on fewer genes. However, heritabilities of cognitive traits typically decrease as their relation to g decreases, and few highly heritable specific abilities have been identified (1, 9). We present here an exception to this trend by demonstrating both high heritability and face specificity of face recognition ability, whose well-defined neural basis and established animal models provide promising tools for investigating its genetic basis at the neural level (10).Face recognition is a paradigmatic example of a cognitively and neurally dissociable trait. Psychophysical studies suggest that the cognitive representation of faces relies on different computational processes than other stimuli (11), and neuroimaging has identified occipitotemporal areas in humans and macaques that respond much more strongly to faces than to other stimuli (12). Single-unit recording shows that macaque face patches consist of cells that respond exclusively to faces (13). Consistent with these findings, studies with patients and transcranial magnetic stimulation have demonstrated selective i...