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Written by Administrator
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Wednesday, 03 February 2010 |
Bee can learn to recognize a human face. This does not mean that the bees know that this is a face. Experiments five years have shown that bees - though having a very small and uncomplicated brains - they are able to distinguish one human face from another.
Adrian Dyer, of the Australian Monash University Laboratory the bees so that flew to a photo of a particular person. However, according to Martin Giurfa from the French University of Toulouse, the bees did not learn to recognize people. "Since the insects were awarded a drop of sugar, when the selection photographs of human faces, seeing them as unusual flowers" - comments the results of these experiments Giurfa quoted by the EurekAlert website. A scientist is supposed that bees associate sweet with a specific finding system components face: the eyes, nose and mouth. To check this, Dyer and Giurfa, (who joined forces to new research) and their colleagues learn to recognize bee cartoon "smileys". In these schematic faces, dots and lines symbolize the eyes, mouth and nose were clustered close together or scattered. Only one such "face" was a sweet syrup, greased it and it had bees. Yes it did, even if the there was nothing sweet. In a second experiment used a five pairs of images. In each pair one was a smiley, followed by dots and lines are not arranged in the model's face. Bees were shown all pairs of images. "Smileys" differed, but each was a sweet syrup. Bees learned so just those images. The culmination of the experiment was to show the bees with a new pair of images, which again was one accidental combination of elements and the second schematic face with features other than the previously used "smilies". And this time, the bees flew toward face. This means that, able to remember the arrangement of its elements to each other. And this happened when in a subsequent similar experiences bees shown "smileys" imposed on the images of human faces. Bees still do not have a problem with their recognition. If scientists, entertaining in Picasso places the eyes, nose and mouth, these images cease to be interesting for bees. "The bees seek specific configuration, in which each element had to be in the proper spatial relationship to other elements" - write the researchers, who published the results of the tests described in the journal "Journal of Experimental Biology. Emphasize the fact that human faces are completely irrelevant to bees elements of their surroundings, and yet the insects can be identified. Until recently it was thought that the ability to recognize faces, which are necessary for certain areas of the brain, particularly developed in humans. Recently, it turned out, however, that even the birds are able to distinguish individual human faces
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Last Updated ( Friday, 05 February 2010 )
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