Does Holistic Processing Require a Large Brain? Insights From Honeybees and Wasps in Fine Visual Recognition Tasks

Abstract

The expertise of humans for recognizing faces is largely based on holistic processing mechanism, a sophisticated cognitive process that develops with visual experience. The various visual features of a face are thus glued together and treated by the brain as a unique stimulus, facilitating robust recognition. Holistic processing is known to facilitate fine discrimination of highly similar visual stimuli, and involves specialized brain areas in humans and other primates. Although holistic processing is most typically employed with face stimuli, subjects can also learn to apply similar image analysis mechanisms when gaining expertise in discriminating novel visual objects, like becoming experts in recognizing birds or cars. Here, we ask if holistic processing with expertise might be a mechanism employed by the comparatively miniature brains of insects. We thus test whether honeybees (Apis mellifera) and/or wasps (Vespula vulgaris) can use holistic-like processing with experience to recognize images of human faces, or Navon-like parameterized-stimuli. These insect species are excellent visual learners and have previously shown ability to discriminate human face stimuli using configural type processing. Freely flying bees and wasps were consequently confronted with classical tests for holistic processing, the part-whole effect and the composite-face effect. Both species could learn similar faces from a standard face recognition test used for humans, and their performance in transfer tests was consistent with holistic processing as defined for studies on humans. Tests with parameterized stimuli also revealed a capacity of honeybees, but not wasps, to process complex visual information in a holistic way, suggesting that such sophisticated visual processing may be far more spread within the animal kingdom than previously thought, although may depend on ecological constraints.

When and Why Did Human Brains Decrease in Size? A New Change-Point Analysis and Insights From Brain Evolution in Ants

“…The precise role of societal information flow, distribution, and transfer as emergent group properties that may affect brain evolution and neural functioning is not well understood (e.g., Weaverdyck and Parkinson, 2018). Large brains may not be required to generate complex behavior, and brain mosaicism and circuitry-rather than overall size-may be important Rowe, 2007, 2013;Chittka and Niven, 2009;Avarguès-Weber et al, 2018;Logan et al, 2018;Godfrey and Gronenberg, 2019). Computational models (e.g., Feinerman and Traniello, 2016;Reséndiz-Benhumea et al, 2021) and patterns in some ant clades (Muscedere and Traniello, 2012;Riveros et al, 2012;Muratore et al, 2021) suggest that group-level cognition may select for reduced brain size and/or adaptive brain size variation.…”

Spontaneous quantity discrimination of artificial flowers by foraging honeybees

“…Specifically, bees have become an ideal species for testing the numerical abilities of invertebrates as they demonstrate visual learning of complex relational and conceptual tasks (Avargues- Weber and Giurfa, 2013;Dyer, 2012;Srinivasan, 2010;Zhang, 2006). Honeybees are able to learn rules and solve tasks in order to receive a reward of sugar water (sucrose) such as maze navigation (Collett et al, 1993;Zhang et al, 1996Zhang et al, , 2000Zhang et al, , 1999, size discrimination (Avargues- Weber et al, 2014;Howard et al, 2017a,b), pattern discrimination (Efler and Ronacher, 2000;Giger and Srinivasan, 1996;Giurfa et al, 1999;Srinivasan et al, 1993;Stach et al, 2004;Zhang and Srinivasan, 1994) and human face recognition (Avargues-Weber et al, 2018;Avargues-Weber et al, 2010b;Dyer et al, 2005), as well as rules of 'above versus below' (Avargues- Weber et al, 2011), and 'same versus different' (Giurfa et al, 2001).…”

Individual recognition is associated with holistic face processing in Polistes paper wasps in a species-specific way

“…Non-primates may use holistic processing to recognize heterospecific human faces with extensive experience. Dogs are sensitive to the partwhole effect with human faces [18], as are honeybees [19][20][21] and Vespula vulgaris wasps [20,22]. The research in honeybees and Vespula wasps is notable because it suggests that even small-brained insects can use sophisticated configural processing with sufficient experience.…”