Tags
animals, biology, Cognition, evolution, face, Facial recognition system, Insecta, Paper wasp, Popular science, science, Wasp
There’s lots of evidence that humans have a specialized mechanism for identifying and responding to faces; for example, people with a condition called prosopagnosia have difficulty recognizing faces but not other objects. A few years ago, researchers showed that individual paper wasps of the species Polistes fuscatus recognize each other’s faces; the same team has now gone on to show that, like humans, P. fuscatus accomplishes this via a specialized mechanism for facial recognition rather than through general shape or pattern recognition. This story is an excellent example of a complex cognitive ability being exhibited by a creature with a relatively simple nervous system.