Bees have been proven to be able to distinguish human faces by sight and remember them.
Derek
The Journal of Experimental Biology 208, 4709-4714
Published by The Company of Biologists 2005
doi:10.1242/jeb.01929
Recognising individuals using facial cues is an
important ability. There is evidence that the mammalian
brain may have specialised neural circuitry for face
recognition tasks, although some recent work questions
these findings. Thus, to understand if recognising human
faces does require species-specific neural processing, it is
important to know if non-human animals might be able to
solve this difficult spatial task. Honeybees (Apis mellifera)
were tested to evaluate whether an animal with no
evolutionary history for discriminating between humanoid
faces may be able to learn this task. Using differential
conditioning, individual bees were trained to visit target
face stimuli and to avoid similar distractor stimuli from a
standard face recognition test used in human psychology.
Performance was evaluated in non-rewarded trials and
bees discriminated the target face from a similar
distractor with greater than 80% accuracy. When novel
distractors were used, bees also demonstrated a high level
of choices for the target face, indicating an ability for face
recognition. When the stimuli were rotated by 180° there
was a large drop in performance, indicating a possible
disruption to configural type visual processing.
Key words: visual processing, face recognition, honeybee, brain.
Summary
Introduction
Honeybee (Apis mellifera) vision can discriminate between and recognise images
of human faces
Adrian G. Dyer1,2,*, Christa Neumeyer1 and Lars Chittka3
