FISH TAUGHT TO
RECOGNISE HUMAN FACES
Call it ‘plaice recognition’ (get it?). A team at the University
of Oxford has found that archerfish are able to recognise
and remember human faces.
The researchers showed archerfish, a species of tropical fish
known for shooting jets of water at its prey, two images of
human faces and trained them to choose one by squirting it.
The fish were then shown the familiar face alongside a series of
44 new, unknown faces and were coaxed into squirting one.
After two experiments, the fish proved to be more than
80 per cent accurate in their choices, even when more
obvious details of the faces, such as colour and overall
shape, were removed.The result is surprising as fish lack the sophisticated
visual cor tex that allows humans to quickly distinguish
different faces.
“Fish have a simpler brain than humans and entirely lack
the section of the brain that humans use for recognising
faces,” explained lead researcher Dr Cait Newpor t. “The
fact that archerfish can learn this task suggests that
complicated brains are not necessarily needed to
recognise human faces. Humans may have special facial
recognition brain structures so that they can process a
large number of faces very quickly or under a wide range
of viewing conditions.”“Do I know you
from somewhere?”Update
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