2005 Media Releases
Friday, 2 December 2005
Knowing the face that feeds you
A honeybee can recognise an individual human face provided it has been properly trained.
The discovery in Europe by a team led by La Trobe University vision scientist Dr Adrian Dyer that a bee—with one hundredth of one per cent the number of neurons of a human brain—can recognise a human face, has surprised the world of vision science.
The research has at least partially answered the previously difficult question: how big does a brain need to be to solve this seemingly complex task?
Dr Dyer, currently based at Cambridge University, Professor Lars Chittka, a behavioural ecologist from Queen Mary, University of London, and Professor Christa Neumeyer, University of Mainz, Germany, set up a complex face recognition experiment for individual bees.
The result of their research is described in 'The Journal of Experimental Biology' published in Britain today.
Dr Dyer said that black and white photographs of human faces were attached to a round board, each with a tiny landing platform beneath it. On each platform was a small container, some containing a sucrose solution and others bitter quinine.
The bees which landed on the platform under one face were rewarded with a sucrose solution but punished with a drop of bitter quinine solution if they chose to visit a different face.
To ensure that the bees did not simply make a beeline for the same area of the board each time they were released, the photographs were repositioned so that the bees could not learn where the rewards were by location.
The bees soon learned to land on the platform under the face where they received the sucrose solution and to ignore the others.
After training was complete, the results were confirmed with unrewarded testing. Although the sucrose was removed, the bees still landed on the platform under the same face.
Dr Dyer said the level of recognition was impressive considering that the stimuli used for the experiments were taken from a standard face-recognition test for which human subjects experience a reasonable degree of difficulty.
‘The results in this study show that bees are capable of recognising human faces, despite having less than 0.01 per cent of the number of neurons found in the human brain.
‘The finding that small insect brains can solve this seemingly advanced cognitive task potentially will lead to the understanding of how relatively simple artificial systems—compared to the human brain—might reliably recognise faces.
‘Further testing showed that bees formed a long-term memory and were able to recognise the target face two days later,’ Dr Dyer said.
The study contributes to an area which has fascinated many scientists over the years—does the human brain require specialised regions to process faces reliably?
Professor Chittka explained that the experiments showed that the task of face recognition did not necessarily require specialised neuronal hardware.
‘Bees have evolved their pattern-recognition skills in a completely different context, flower recognition, and have wonderful flexibility in transferring these skills to other patterns, including facial ones.’
‘Our results show that even a miniature brain can acquire face recognition as a learned expertise.'
For further information:
Dr Adrian Dyer
Department of Plant Sciences,
University of Cambridge,
CB2 3EA, UK
Email: a.dyer@latrobe.edu.au
or La Trobe University Media and Communications, Tel: +61 3 9479 2316