4709

The Journal of Experimental Biology 208, 4709-4714
Published by The Company of Biologists 2005
doi:10.1242/jeb.01929

Honeybee (Apis mellifera) vision can discriminate between and recognise imagesof human faces
Adrian G. Dyer1,2,*, Christa Neumeyer1 and Lars Chittka3
1

Institut fur Zoologie III (Neurobiologie), Johannes Gutenberg Universität, Mainz, 55099, Germany, 2Clinical Vision
Sciences, La Trobe University, Victoria 3086, Australia and 3School of Biological Sciences, Queen Mary, Universityof London, London, E1 4NS, UK*Author for correspondence at present address: Department of Plant Sciences, University of Cambridge, Downing Street, Cambridge,
CB2 3EA, UK (e-mail: a.dyer@latrobe.edu.au)

Accepted 13 October 2005

Summary
Recognising individuals using facial cues is anface stimuli and to avoid similar distractor stimuli from aimportant ability. There is evidence that the mammalianstandard face recognition test used in human psychology.
brain may have specialised neural circuitry for face
Performance was evaluated in non-rewarded trials andrecognition tasks, although some recent work questions
bees discriminated the target face from a similar
these findings. Thus, to understand if recognising human
distractor with greater than 80% accuracy. When novel
faces does require species-specific neural processing, it isdistractors were used, bees also demonstrated a high level
important to know if non-human animals might be able toof choices for the target face, indicating an ability for facesolve this difficult spatial task. Honeybees (Apis mellifera)
recognition. When the stimuli were rotated by 180° there
was a large drop in performance, indicating a possible
were tested to evaluate whether an animal with nodisruption to configural type visual processing.
evolutionary history for discriminating between humanoid
faces may be able to learn this task. Using differentialconditioning, individual bees were trained to visit target
Key words: visual processing, face recognition, honeybee, brain.

Introduction
There is considerable interest in the mechanisms thatfacilitate recognition of human faces (Bruce, 1988; Kanwisher,
2000; Tarr and Cheng, 2003; Duchaine et al., 2004). It has beensuggested that the human brain may have specialised regions
to allow for the processing of faces (Kanwisher et al., 1997;
Kanwisher, 2000; Duchaine et al., 2004). For example, using
fMRI imaging techniques, the fusiform gyrus region of thehuman brain shows increased activity when human subjects
view face images but not control images such as other animals(Kanwisher et al., 1997; Kanwisher, 2000). It has also been
observed that human subjects show a disproportionate deficit
for recognising faces when a stimulus is rotated by 180° (Yin,
1969; Bartlett and Searcy, 1993; Campbell et al., 1997;
Pascalis et al., 2002; Duchaine et al., 2004). Furthermore,
subjects suffering a condition known as prosopagnosia, which
is a severe deficit in recognising faces, are reported to havenormal processing of other classes of objects, such as artificial,
computer-generated creatures called ‘greebles’ (Duchaine etal., 2004). The apparent specialised ability of the human brain
for recognising the faces of conspecifics has been suggested as
being important to the complex social interactions of humans(Pierce et al., 2001).
The evidence for a special region of the human brain forprocessing faces has recently been challenged, however, by

data showing that the fusiform gyrus in subjects who have aparticular field of expertise, for example bird watchers or car
experts, also shows increased activity when these subjects view
stimuli from their specific class of expertise (Gauthier et al.,
2000; Tarr and Gauthier, 2000). In addition, a fMRI study ofsubjects with autism shows that face processing can be reliably
facilitated by regions of the brain other than the fusiform gyrus(Pierce et al., 2001).
Other animals, including invertebrates, are able to recognise
conspecifics using facial cues (Kendrick et al., 2001; Tibbetts,
2002; Tibbetts and Dale, 2004). For example, individual paper
wasps (Polistes fuscatus) are able to recognise the facial
features of other individual wasps to help maintain a strongsocial order within a hive (Tibbetts, 2002). However, even inhumans it is currently not clear whether face recognition
requires specialised, species-specific neuronal circuitry, or ifface recognition might be a learned expertise, as a result ofextensive experience with a certain class of visual stimuli (Tarrand Cheng, 2003). In the present study, the honeybee (Apismellifera) was used as an animal model that has not been
exposed to evolutionary pressure for recognising human faces
but does have impressive pattern recognition and cognitive
abilities that might facilitate the task (Gould, 1985; Lehrer,
1997; Chittka et al., 2003; Stach et al., 2004; Dyer and Chittka,

THE JOURNAL OF EXPERIMENTAL BIOLOGY

4710 A. G. Dyer, C. Neumeyer and L. Chittka
2004; Zhang and Srinivasan, 2004). For example, there isevidence that bees may solve visual tasks using either
configural retinotopic-template type matching strategies(Wehner, 1981; Gould, 1985, 1986; Srinivasan, 1994; Giger
and Srinivasan, 1995) and/or a set of features extracted fromstimuli (Srinivasan, 1994; Giger and Srinivasan, 1995; Efler
and Ronacher, 2000; Stach et al., 2004). If bees can recognisehuman faces, then this is evidence that face recognition
requires neither a specialised neuronal circuitry nor afundamentally advanced nervous system.
Materials and methods
Honeybee experiments
Honeybees were maintained in a colony located 25·m froma feeding site where foragers collected 10% sucrose solution.
Individual foragers were captured at the feeding site andtransferred 5·m to a test site. At the test site, a bee was colour
marked and given 25% sucrose solution.
Stimuli were 6⫻8·cm achromatic photographs presented ona vertical, circular plastic screen of 50·cm diameter that could
be rotated to prevent position learning (Fig.·1A). Two target
and two distractor stimuli were mounted on freely rotating
hangers with a landing platform (Fig.·1B). The experiment
allowed the bees to fly towards a stimulus and choose the visual
angle required to solve the task (Lehrer, 1993; Giger andSrinivasan, 1995; Horridge, 1996; Efler and Ronacher, 2000).
A target stimulus contained a reward of a 10·␮l drop of 25%
sucrose solution and a distractor stimulus contained apunishment of a 10·␮l drop of 0.12% quinine hemisulphate topromote motivation to perform difficult visual discrimination
tasks (Chittka et al., 2003).
Bees were given pre-training to a simple discrimination taskof a target face taken from a standard face recognition test
(Warrington, 1996a) and a computer-generated schematic
distractor (Fig.·1C, column i). The stimuli were cropped to
exclude spatial cues such as clothing in the original images
enabling recognition (Fig.·1). Bees collected sucrose solution
until satiated, at which point they returned to the hive, and thisset of actions was defined as a foraging bout. Between bouts,
landing platforms and stimuli were cleaned with 30% ethanol.
The pre-training stage allowed bees to learn that they would
receive rewards for correct decisions and punishment forincorrect decisions, analogous to how human subjects gain
experience with stimuli and apparatus for a psychophysics
type experiment (Maddox and Bohil, 2004). When a bee
landed on the platform of a target stimulus, it drank thesucrose solution, and then an additional drop was presented
on a clear Plexiglas spoon so that the bee could be moved 1·maway from the screen. Whilst the bee was drinking the sucrose
solution on the spoon, its body position was rotated so that it
was looking away from the stimuli, and during this time
stimuli positions were altered to prevent bees associating
rewards with particular spatial locations. When a bee had
consumed the sucrose solution on the spoon it thenapproached stimuli again and had to learn the correct stimulus

Fig.·1 (A) Foraging set up for honeybees. (B) Bee looking at a target
face. (C) The ability of bees to discriminate between images of humanfaces. The upper region shows task (target top and distracter bottom),and the column immediately below shows mean percentage of correct
choices for five bees in non-rewarded tests (±1 S.E.M.). Bees weretrained to the face at the top of column i versus a schematic face
distracter, then to recognise the target face from the distracter incolumn ii. Bees then recognised the target face from novel distracters(columns iii, iv) but failed to discriminate faces rotated by 180°
(column v). Pooled choices for non-rewarded tests in the respective
conditions (i=166, ii=246, iii=199, iv=196, v=141).

in order to collect rewards. The procedure of moving the bees
away from the screen during training was important as thisprevented bees from simply flying vertically between thelanding platforms without visually inspecting a stimulus. Pilot
experiments indicated that bees did not learn even the simple
pre-training task well unless they were taught to firsthorizontally approach the stimuli from a distance. Five bees
learned this pre-training task well and were subsequently
trained with face stimuli (see below). Two other bees failed
to show any indication of learning even the relatively simple
pre-training task as they usually flew to the high contrast
contours of the schematic face; these two bees subsequently
received the quinine hemisulphate solution on a majority ofvisits to stimuli and soon lost interest in the experiment anddid not return to the testing site. The results reported in thisstudy thus represent data for bees that were highly trained to
the visual task. In a given bout, the mean (± S.E.M.) numberof choices by the bees was 10.0±1.7. When acquisition

THE JOURNAL OF EXPERIMENTAL BIOLOGYreached above 80% correct choices, the bees were given a
non-rewarded test.
The task was then changed by presenting distractor facestimuli that were similar to the target stimuli (Fig.·1C, columnii). The bees were trained with differential conditioning (Giurfa
et al., 1999; Dyer and Chittka, 2004), and when acquisition
reached 80% (10 training bouts) each bee was tested in a nonrewarded trial that terminated when the test bee first lostinterest in making choices and temporarily abandoned the test
apparatus. Distractor stimuli were then removed from thescreen, and a drop of sucrose solution was placed on the target
stimuli. When the bee subsequently returned it was allowed tocollect sucrose from the target stimuli until satiated to ensure
motivation for additional non-rewarded trials.
Each bee was then presented with non-rewarded tests using
the target stimuli and two different types of novel distractor
stimuli (Fig.·1C, columns iii and iv, respectively). These two
tests were done sequentially, and between these tests bees wererewarded to ensure motivation.
Bees were then given a non-rewarded test using the original
training face stimuli where both of these stimuli were rotatedby 180° (Fig.·1C, column v). The entire sequence of tests wascompleted in one day for each of five bees.
Finally, two of the bees were given a non-rewarded test withoriginal training stimuli two days after their initial training toevaluate whether the learning of face stimuli had led toformation of a long-term memory.
Human subject subjective rankings of faces
Six human subjects (mean age ± S.E.M., 27.8±2.2·years) withnormal corrected vision were asked to rank the three distractor
face stimuli in relation to the perceptual similarity to the target
face stimulus. This was done by simultaneously presenting thetarget stimulus and the three different distractor stimuli andindividually asking each subject to rank the distractor stimuli
faces in order of similarity to the target stimulus. It is known
that the adult human visual system recognises faces mainly byusing a configural strategy (Tanaka and Farah, 1993; Bartlett
and Searcy, 1993; Tanaka and Sengco, 1997; Collishaw andHole, 2000). The subjective rankings were determined toinvestigate if bee choices for the different distractor faces
correlated with how humans ranked the perceptual similarityof distractor stimuli.
Results
After each bee was trained to the target face versus theschematic distractor stimuli for over 50 visits, their ability todiscriminate stimuli was tested in non-rewarded trials, andchoices were significantly different from chance (Fig.·1C,column i; ␹2=98.1, d.f.=1, P<0.001). Fig.·2 shows that, when
the distractor face stimulus was introduced into the test
scenario, the frequency of correct choices was initially close to
the 50% random foraging line, showing that, despite the pretraining with the target face, the bees were not yet able todiscriminate the target face from a similar distractor. However,Correct choice (%)

Bees recognise faces 4711
100
90
80
70
60
50

1

2

3

4

5
6
7
Foraging bout

8

9

10

Fig.·2. Acquisition for five bees (± S.E.M.) learning to discriminate atarget face from the distractor face stimulus shown in Fig.·1C columnii.

with continued differential conditioning (Giurfa et al., 1999;
Dyer and Chittka, 2004) the bees gradually learned todiscriminate between the similar human face stimuli (Fig.·2).
Following differential conditioning, correct choices for thetarget face were evaluated in a non-rewarded test (Fig.·1C,column ii). During both training and the non-rewarded tests,
the bees often hovered in front of a stimulus before making adecision to land (Fig.·1B), and the mean hovering distancefrom the stimuli was 6.4±1.1·cm (S.E.M.). The choices for thetarget face were significantly different from chance (␹2=94.8,
d.f.=1, P<0.001), showing that it is possible for this animalmodel to learn how to discriminate between images of humanfaces. Correct choices for the target face versus the novel
distracters were also significantly different from chance(␹2=141.5, d.f.=1, P<0.001), indicating that, in addition to
being able to discriminate a target face from a learned
distractor, bees were able to recognise the target face fromnovel distractors.
Bees tested on the original training pair of faces, but withboth faces rotated by 180° (Fig.·1C, column v), performed
significantly poorer (Wilcoxon Signed Rank Test; N=5,
Z=–2.023, P=0.043), indicating that stimulus rotation disrupts
the bees’ ability to process the learned images of the faces.
Two bees tested 2·days after the initial training retained theinformation in long-term memory. One bee scored 93.9% on
the initial day of training and 79.2% 2·days later; and a second
bee achieved scores of 87.4% and 75.9%, respectively. Thisshows that the differential conditioning to face stimuli led to
the formation of a long-term memory in bees.
Human subject subjective rankings of faces
All six subjects ranked distractor faces in the same order;
compared with target, the most similar face was the distractor
in Fig.·1C column iv, the distractor in column ii was ranked
second and the least similar face was the distractor in columniii. The ranking of the three distractor face stimuli in relation
to the perceptual similarity of the target face stimulus byhuman subjects was tested for a correlation with how
accurately the bees discriminated between stimuli. Whilst thebees choices shown in Fig.·1C indicate a trend that bees do
discriminate between faces more accurately when the faces areranked perceptually less similar by humans, this relationshipwas not significant (rs=0.151, N=15, P=0.591).

THE JOURNAL OF EXPERIMENTAL BIOLOGY4712 A. G. Dyer, C. Neumeyer and L. Chittka
Discussion
The findings of this study show that honeybees have theability to both discriminate between target and distractor facesthat have been learned (Fig.·1C, column ii) and to recognise
the target face from novel distractors (Fig.·1C, columns iii andiv). The level of recognition is impressive considering that thestimuli used for the experiments were taken from a standard
face-recognition test for which human subjects experience areasonable degree of difficulty (Warrington, 1996a,b). We
ascribe the high level of performance to four importantcomponents of the training procedure: (1) bees were first given
pre-training to a relatively simple discrimination task, whichenabled them to learn that there was a task to be solved; (2)bees were punished for errors with a bitter-tasting solution thathas the effect of increasing bee motivation to solving difficult
tasks (Chittka et al., 2003); (3) bees were provided withextensive amounts of differential conditioning (Giurfa et al.,1999) to the training stimuli to allow a sufficient time to beable to learn the visual task; (4) stimuli were presented with an
unconstrained visual angle that allowed bees to potentially use
either configural and/or feature extraction visual strategies(Efler and Ronacher, 2000).
Two possible mechanisms by which bees may process
spatial information are either by using a retinotopic-template
type matching strategy or by using a set of features extracted
from the stimuli (Efler and Ronacher, 2000). There is evidence
that in some circumstances bees use retinotopic-template typematching that is consistent with configural processing(Wehner, 1981; Gould, 1985; Gould, 1986; Srinivasan, 1994;
Giger and Srinivasan, 1995), whilst in some circumstances thedata are more consistent with a feature extraction model ofvisual processing (Srinivasan, 1994; Giger and Srinivasan,
1995; Efler and Ronacher, 2000; Stach et al., 2004). For facerecognition tasks, adult humans mainly use a configural visualstrategy (Tanaka and Farah, 1993; Bartlett and Searcy, 1993;
Tanaka and Sengco, 1997; Collishaw and Hole, 2000). Bee
choices for the different faces were not significantly correlatedwith adult human perceptual rankings for faces, possibly
suggesting bees were not using a configural strategy to solve
the task. However, a confounding factor is that in humanprocessing of faces, subjects develop different visualstrategies between the ages of 6 and 10·years; at 6·years ofage children appear to use a feature extraction model of visual
processing but by 10·years of age performance is moreconsistent with a configural model of visual processing (Careyand Diamond, 1977) and it is also known that bees do use
different visual strategies depending upon the type and levelof conditioning to spatial features (Giurfa et al., 2003).
Furthermore, recent work using eye movement studies inhumans suggests that whilst adults use a configural
mechanism to recognize faces, the learning of faces byhumans requires some level of feature extraction processing
to promote reliable recognition (Henderson et al., 2005). The
absence of a relationship between bee choices and adulthuman perceptual rankings could thus be a result of either (1)the extent to which bees were using configural processing not

being as strong as in adult humans who have had much more
extensive experience with faces or (2) bees solving the taskusing a feature extraction model of visual processing. In theformer, bees may move from feature extraction to configuralprocessing depending upon their individual level ofexperience.
Stach et al. (2004) show that bees are able to link andassemble local features of a visual pattern to construct a
representation of a stimulus, suggesting that some form of afeature extraction model may enable bees to solve the facerecognition task. However, the large decrease in the frequency
of bee correct choices when the stimuli were rotated by 180°suggests that configural processing may have been disrupted,
since this type of stimulus manipulation has a much greater
effect on configural rather than feature extraction mechanisms
in human visual processing of face stimuli (Collishaw andHole, 2000). Thus, from the data in the current experiments, it
is not possible to definitively conclude which mechanism bees
use to recognise images of human faces, which indeed may be
because individual bees might use different mechanisms
depending upon the level of experience with the training
stimuli (Giurfa et al., 2003). Future experiments may be able
to reveal the visual mechanism used by bees to facilitate facerecognition by using a wider range of face stimuli and byconsidering the variety of approaches previously used to revealfeature extraction and configural mechanisms for the humanperception of faces (e.g. Yin, 1969; Carey and Diamond, 1977;
Bruce, 1988; Rizzo et al., 1987; Tanaka and Farah, 1993;
Tanaka and Sengco, 1997; Collishaw and Hole, 2000).
The honeybee brain has less than 0.01% the number ofneurons of the human brain (Zhang and Srinivasan, 2004).
There has been considerable debate about the level of cognitive
resources required to recognise faces. Some evidence suggeststhat highly specialised neural regions within the mammalianbrain are required for face recognition tasks (Kanwisher et al.,
1997; Kanwisher, 2000), whilst other studies suggest that facerecognition is only one case of visual expertise with a certainclass of stimuli (Gauthier et al., 2000; Tarr and Gauthier, 2000;
Tarr and Cheng, 2003). Pascalis et al. (2002) tested the visual
capabilities of 6-month-old and 9-month-old human infants
and showed that the six-month-old infants were equally goodat recognising both human and non-human primates, whilst by
9·months of age the perceptual window narrows towards
recognising individuals within the human species. However,this neural plasticity in humans appears to be confined to facecategories that include human and primate faces but not faces
from a totally different species such as cows (Campbell et al.,1997). Many hymenopteran insects have impressive cognitive
abilities that are used to detect and identify different types offlowers in order to collect nutritional rewards (Gould, 1985;
Lehrer, 1997; Chittka et al., 2003; Stach et al., 2004; Dyer andChittka, 2004; Zhang and Srinivasan, 2004). The studies byTibbetts (2002) and Tibbetts and Dale (2004) show thathymenopteran insects are capable of recognising the faces ofconspecifics in the context of complex social structures, but toour knowledge this current study is the first report that

THE JOURNAL OF EXPERIMENTAL BIOLOGYBees recognise faces 4713
invertebrates have sufficient neural flexibility to learn how todiscriminate between and recognise faces of other species.
In normal human subjects, the processing by the visual andneural system for faces is very fast (Campbell et al., 1997;
Pascalis et al., 2002) and can deal with a large number ofdifferent faces (Standing et al., 1970; Bruce, 1988). Whilst an
insect’s brain is unlikely to be able to reach these levels of
performance, our results show that recognition of human faces
can be achieved by a honeybee brain following differentialconditioning to this class of visual stimuli. This suggests thatface recognition is a task that can be solved, at least to acertain level, by a general neural system that has a reasonable
degree of plasticity. The finding that bees can reliably
recognise faces may seem surprising in the context that there
are human subjects who suffer from prosopagnosia and are
unable to recognise the faces of familiar persons, despite
having reasonably normal visual processing (Rizzo et al.,
1987; De Renzi and di Pellegrino, 1998; Duchaine, 2004).
However, there is evidence that subjects with prosopagnosia
may covertly recognise individual faces and that the inability
to be able to report recognition is due to limitations on theactivation of associated memory for a face (Tranel andDamasio, 1985), even though the visual system has captured
sufficient information to allow for a recognition (Tranel andDamasio, 1985; Rizzo et al., 1987). The results in this current
study show that even bees are capable of recognising humanfaces and thus supports the view that the human brain may notneed to have a visual area specific for the recognition of faces(Gauthier et al., 2000; Tarr and Gauthier, 2000; Tarr andCheng, 2003). However, the result cannot fully exclude thepossibility that the human brain does have a specific region
for the processing of faces since there is also evidence fromone subject for whom face processing remains normal despite
agnosia (a recognition deficit) for non-face objects(Moscovitch et al., 1997). Further experiments with bees thattackle fundamental questions that have been investigated inhumans for face recognition tasks (Yin, 1969; Carey andDiamond, 1977; Bruce, 1988; Rizzo et al., 1987; Tanaka andFarah, 1993; Tanaka and Sengco, 1997; Collishaw and Hole,
2000) may reveal the extent to which a relatively simple brain
can solve these tasks and may thus help define a baseline forthe minimum cognitive resources required to facilitate facerecognition.
Conclusion
This study shows that it is possible for honeybees to bothlearn to discriminate between similar human faces and to
subsequently recognise a target face when it is presented inconjunction with novel distractor faces. The findings indicatethat it is possible for the visual and neural system of an animal
to learn to reliably recognise a human face, even though theanimal has no evolutionary history for the task.
We are grateful for technical assistance from Dr J.
Schramme and Ms C. Schröder. A.G.D. is grateful to theAlexander von Humboldt Foundation for support.

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