Posts: Science and Nature / Bees - They Know Who You Are and They Know Where You Live

From the article: "What is really amazing is that an insect with a microdot-sized brain can handle this type of image analysis when we have entire regions of brain dedicated to the problem. Giurfa explains that if we want to design automatic facial recognition systems, we could learn a lot by using the bees' approach to face recognition."

Even though the human brain dedicates a lot of resources to facial recognition, I expect a face-shape (two eyes, a nose and a mouth) is an inherently easy stimulus to remember for an insect that is designed to discriminate between different species of plants and flowers. I think it's just that humans have both the ability to quickly recognize faces but at the same time dedicate major resources to processing deeper details such as emotion.

fag

infant begin very basic biases toward attending to and encoding certain shapes over others (e.g., circles versus squares) and also other things such as how living things move relative to none living things (force pushing an object). There is tons of work in this area using really interesting methods to test preverbal babies on whether the can understand something.
Anyway as we gain knowledge in these domains our brain, unlike the bee, continues on to build on these connections that are now focused on more social emotional aspects of processing. So that while a bee might in fact be better at facial recognition (because human are not very good at it) we can, however, infer tons of emotional information from somebody, like are they happy or sad, from even a partial photo of a face, something a bee could arguably never do.