Polistes metricus, femaleWIKIMEDIA, SAM DROEGEHumans are face-recognition specialists. We can pick out faces better than other patterns, but not all animals excel like we do. A few groups of large-brained social animals, including macaques and sheep, are known to recognize each other by facial features, and among insects the talent is especially rare—only a handful of paper-wasp species are known to do it.
To uncover the genetic basis of wasp face recognition, researchers analyzed gene expression in the brains of paper-wasp species that had been trained to recognize faces and compared that with wasps trained to recognize patterns. As reported today (June 14) in the Journal of Experimental Biology, they found that the brain gene-expression patterns involved in face- and pattern-recognition are different.
“There is something special about face learning, and we can detect this on the level of brain gene activity,” study author Ali Berens, now at Monsanto, tells The Scientist in an email. “The activity of hundreds of genes change in the brain during facial recognition. This illustrates that brain responses to relevant social stimuli (like faces) can be highly specific on the level of genes.”
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