Bees with tiny brains master human-face recognition
Researchers trained honeybees (~1 mm brains) to distinguish human faces using photographs and rewards; the bees achieved 80–90% accuracy and remembered the trained face for at least two days, even when faces appeared from different viewpoints. The bees relied on configural processing—the relationships between facial features—similar to humans, challenging the notion that such high-level recognition requires large brains or specialized neural regions. The findings suggest that small neural systems with general learning rules can solve complex visual tasks and may inform AI approaches to recognition with limited resources.