ArticleScientific reports2016
Discrimination of human faces by archerfish (Toxotes chatareus).
Article in Scientific reports, 2016. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 26 papers.
What it found
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The abstract states no effect estimate the extractor could read, or names no intervention and outcome on the map, so this paper lights no cell and moves no belief. It is still indexed, cited and linked below.
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Who cites it
26 citing papers in PubMed.
- Visual perception of rotated chromatic and achromatic 3D stimuli in goldfish (Carassius auratus).Learning & behavior · 2026Article
- The visual challenges of short-range navigation in teleost fish.The Journal of experimental biology · 2026Review
- ManyFishes: a big team science collaboration on fish comparative cognition.Animal cognition · 2025Review
- Wider Than the Sky: An Alternative to "Mapping" the World Onto the Brain.The European journal of neuroscience · 2025Article
- Tokay geckos adjust their behaviour based on handler familiarity but according to context.Scientific reports · 2025Article
- Development of convergent adaptations reveal highly conserved early ontogenetic skull shape in fishes with amphibious vision.Scientific reports · 2025Article
- GoFish: A low-cost, open-source platform for closed-loop behavioural experiments on fish.Behavior research methods · 2024Article
- Prosocial behavior in competitive fish: the case of the archerfish.Communications biology · 2023Article
- Cleaner fish recognize self in a mirror via self-face recognition like humans.Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · 2023Article
- Preference and discrimination of facial expressions of humans, rats, and mice by C57 mice.Animal cognition · 2022Article
- Recognition of natural objects in the archerfish.The Journal of experimental biology · 2022Article
- Visual discrimination and amodal completion in zebrafish.PloS one · 2022Article
- Automated Operant Conditioning Devices for Fish. Do They Work?Animals : an open access journal from MDPI · 2021Article
- Dog-human social relationship: representation of human face familiarity and emotions in the dog brain.Animal cognition · 2021Article
- An Evolutionary Microcircuit Approach to the Neural Basis of High Dimensional Sensory Processing in Olfaction.Frontiers in cellular neuroscience · 2021Article
- Five Breakthroughs: A First Approximation of Brain Evolution From Early Bilaterians to Humans.Frontiers in neuroanatomy · 2021Article
- The macaque face patch system: a turtle's underbelly for the brain.Nature reviews. Neuroscience · 2020Review
- Representation of edges, head direction, and swimming kinematics in the brain of freely-navigating fish.Scientific reports · 2020Article
- Long-range neural inhibition and stimulus competition in the archerfish optic tectum.Journal of comparative physiology. A, Neuroethology, sensory, neural, and behavioral physiology · 2019Article
- Are face recognition abilities in humans and sheep really 'comparable'?Royal Society open science · 2019Article
Corrections and comments
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Authors and funding
4 authors.
Funding
No grant is acknowledged in the PubMed record.
Abstract
Two rival theories of how humans recognize faces exist: (i) recognition is innate, relying on specialized neocortical circuitry, and (ii) recognition is a learned expertise, relying on general object recognition pathways. Here, we explore whether animals without a neocortex, can learn to recognize human faces. Human facial recognition has previously been demonstrated for birds, however they are now known to possess neocortex-like structures. Also, with much of the work done in domesticated pigeons, one cannot rule out the possibility that they have developed adaptations for human face recognition. Fish do not appear to possess neocortex-like cells, and given their lack of direct exposure to humans, are unlikely to have evolved any specialized capabilities for human facial recognition. Using a two-alternative forced-choice procedure, we show that archerfish (Toxotes chatareus) can learn to discriminate a large number of human face images (Experiment 1, 44 faces), even after controlling for colour, head-shape and brightness (Experiment 2, 18 faces). This study not only demonstrates that archerfish have impressive pattern discrimination abilities, but also provides evidence that a vertebrate lacking a neocortex and without an evolutionary prerogative to discriminate human faces, can nonetheless do so to a high degree of accuracy.
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Registered trials
Read under generation 80e0d062 · epoch 390. Bibliography from PubMed, PubMed Central and OpenAlex; grants from NIH RePORTER; trial links from ClinicalTrials.gov; estimates, votes and beliefs from the OpenQuestion graph.