Now Reading: Honeybees can learn to recognise human faces, studies show
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Honeybees can learn to recognise human faces, studies show
Honeybees can be trained with sugar rewards to recognise human faces and can later pick out the same face from new angles and among unfamiliar faces. A 2010 study in the Journal…
The Story in Brief
Honeybees can be trained with sugar rewards to recognise human faces and can later pick out the same face from new angles and among unfamiliar faces. A 2010 study in the Journal of Experimental Biology found bees use configural processing, arranging features in correct spatial relationships, to sort simplified face-like patterns. They dismissed low-level cues like centre of gravity or spatial frequency.
Another study showed bees discriminated a target face from distractors with over 80% accuracy. When trained faces were rotated 180 degrees, performance dropped sharply, mirroring a known quirk in human vision. Retests two days later showed memory held, with one bee scoring 93.9% then 79.2%. The researchers concluded the tiny bee brain, lacking specialised face-processing regions, can achieve genuine facial recognition through training.
The Indian Opinion
The headline-friendly framing, bees recognise faces, distracts from the more interesting question. Neither study claims the insects evolved for this. They were trained with sugar rewards and solved the problem as a pattern-recognition task. The real wonder is not that bees can do it, but what it suggests about how little specialised brain wiring a task like facial recognition actually needs. Engineers designing recognition algorithms still rely on far more compute than a bee's 0.01% of human neurons. The test to watch for: whether these findings translate into simpler, low-power machine vision systems.
Source: timesofindia.indiatimes.com
This story was synthesised by AI from the source linked above.
