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Abstract The problem of distinguishing identical twins and non‐twin look‐alikes in automated facial recognition (FR) applications has become increasingly important with the widespread adoption of facial biometrics. Due to the high facial similarity of both identical twins and look‐alikes, these face pairs represent the hardest cases presented to facial recognition tools. This work presents an application of one of the largest twin data sets compiled to date to address two FR challenges: (1) determining a baseline measure of facial similarity between identical twins and (2) applying this similarity measure to determine the impact of doppelgangers, or look‐alikes, on FR performance for large face data sets. The facial similarity measure is determined via a deep convolutional neural network. This network is trained on a tailored verification task designed to encourage the network to group together highly similar face pairs in the embedding space and achieves a test AUC of 0.9799. The proposed network provides a quantitative similarity score for any two given faces and has been applied to large‐scale face data sets to identify similar face pairs. An additional analysis that correlates the comparison score returned by a facial recognition tool and the similarity score returned by the proposed network has also been performed. 

There is an ongoing debate on the contribution of the neuronal glutamate transporter EAAC1 to the onset of compulsive behaviors. Here, we used behavioral, electrophysiological, molecular, and viral approaches in male and female mice to identify the molecular and cellular mechanisms by which EAAC1 controls the execution of repeated motor behaviors. Our findings show that, in the striatum, a brain region implicated with movement execution, EAAC1 limits group I metabotropic glutamate receptor (mGluRI) activation, facilitates D1 dopamine receptor (D1R) expression, and ensures long-term synaptic plasticity. Blocking mGluRI in slices from mice lacking EAAC1 restores D1R expression and synaptic plasticity. Conversely, activation of intracellular signaling pathways coupled to mGluRI in D1R-containing striatal neurons of mice expressing EAAC1 leads to reduced D1R protein level and increased stereotyped movement execution. These findings identify new molecular mechanisms by which EAAC1 can shape glutamatergic and dopaminergic signals and control repeated movement execution.