法国国家科研中心的研究人员日前发现，蜜蜂的大脑虽小，却能识别人脸和其他景物的区别，这说明它们有一定的抽象记忆能力。
该机构动物认识力研究中心的科学家在英国《实验生物学杂志》上报告说，在蜜蜂的眼里，人脸被简化成一幅抽象的线条画，两点代表眼睛，一条垂直线象征着鼻子，一条横线代表嘴巴。蜜蜂能将这样的一组结构记在脑中，与其他的图像进行区别。
据研究小组的负责人马丁·朱尔法介绍，他与同事曾训练蜜蜂识别人脸，如果蜜蜂做出了正确的选择，那么就将得到一滴甜水作为奖励，结果他们发现，即使在比较复杂的人脸图像前，蜜蜂也能“照认不误”。（生物谷Bioon.com）
生物谷推荐原始出处：
Journal of Experimental Biology 213, 593-601 (2010)
Configural processing enables discrimination and categorization of face-like stimuli in honeybees
A. Avarguès-Weber1,2, G. Portelli1,2, J. Benard1,2, A. Dyer3 and M. Giurfa1,2,*
1 Université de Toulouse, UPS, Centre de Recherches sur la Cognition Animale, 118 route de Narbonne, F-31062 Toulouse Cedex 9, France
2 CNRS, Centre de Recherches sur la Cognition Animale, 118 route de Narbonne, F-31062 Toulouse Cedex 9, France
3 Department of Physiology, Monash University, Clayton, Victoria, VIC 3800, Australia
We studied whether honeybees can distinguish face-like configurations by using standardized stimuli commonly employed in primate and human visual research. Furthermore, we studied whether, irrespective of their capacity to distinguish between face-like stimuli, bees learn to classify visual stimuli built up of the same elements in face-like versus non-face-like categories. We showed that bees succeeded in discriminating both face-like and non-face-like stimuli and categorized appropriately novel stimuli in these two classes. To this end, they used configural information and not just isolated features or low-level cues. Bees looked for a specific configuration in which each feature had to be located in an appropriate spatial relationship with respect to the others, thus showing sensitivity for first-order relationships between features. Although faces are biologically irrelevant stimuli for bees, the fact that they were able to integrate visual features into complex representations suggests that face-like stimulus categorization can occur even in the absence of brain regions specialized in face processing.
