At the same time, as the experiment of an international group of zoologists has shown, insects do it in the same way as humans - they perceive the whole face, and do not recognize individual elements.
Despite the fact that we can easily recognize a friend when we look at his face, in fact this is a complex process. One of its features is that we rather look not at individual facial features - eyes, nose, hair or mouth - but at their relative position. As soon as we remember what a person looks like, his face is perceived as a whole and becomes a unique stimulus for us. To do this, you need to have three cognitive skills: the ability to understand the spatial relationship between elements, the ability to "glue" individual facial features into a whole, and second-order sensitivity, which allows you to catch small spatial differences.
However, experiments show that not only humans can recognize faces. In particular, some animals and even social insects have this ability - for example, paper wasps (Polistes fuscatus) are able to distinguish their congeners. However, scientists still did not understand how they do it: whether insects pay attention to individual traits of another individual, or whether they process information “like a human being”.
To find out, researchers led by Aurora Avargues-Weber of the University of Toulouse conducted four visual experiments involving bees and common wasps. Previously, the animals were trained to recognize faces: they were shown a positive stimulus and a negative stimulus. In front of the images there were small platforms with nectar (for a "good" face) or with a tasteless solution (for a "bad" face).
The first test completely repeated the training: the insects had to sit on a platform in front of the image of a person, where either a treat in case of a correct answer, or a tasteless solution in case of an error awaited them. In the second test, called the "internal test," the insects, after preliminary training, showed the face of a "good" or "bad" person out of context - the researchers painted over their hair, ears, and other "clues." The animals had to choose the right incentive with a reward. In the third test, the researchers demonstrated the face of a “bad” person who had the same hair, ears, neck and oval as the “good” person, and in the fourth, the task was inverted and now the hair, neck and other features of the "bad" person.
The results showed that the first test was performed by bees with an accuracy of about 86.3 percent, and wasps - 77.9 percent. This proves that insects can learn to distinguish between faces.