Abstract
Individuals vary substantially in their ability to recognize faces, and these differences affect social functioning. But which aspects of nature and nurture impact face recognition? Early life stress is a likely candidate, as adverse childhood environments impact the development of many major cognitive, social, and affective functions. At the same time, evidence from twins suggests that variation in face recognition ability is due primarily to variations in genes and not environments. Here, we use a combined individual differences and epidemiological approach to directly assess whether variations in early life stress are linked with face recognition ability. We define early life stress as exposure to one of 25 forms of common childhood adversity before the age of 18. In approximately 4,000 adults, we show that face recognition ability is not significantly associated with variations in early life stress (including neglect, socioeconomic deprivation, physical abuse, and sexual abuse). Complex emotion perception ability, on the other hand, was reduced among individuals with a range of early life stress experiences. Our findings indicate that face recognition ability is uniquely resilient to variations in early life stress and childhood environment, thus ruling out domain general and process general accounts of the impact of early life stress on cognitive development.
Meeting abstract presented at VSS 2015