Study
Discrimination of human faces by archerfish (Toxotes chatareus)
Newport, Cait; Wallis, Guy; Reshitnyk, Yarema; Siebeck, Ulrike E.
Scientific Reports, 2016
Archerfish, which knock prey from vegetation with a jet of water, were trained to spit at one human face shown on a screen above the tank. They were then tested against dozens of unfamiliar faces, and again with the images converted to greyscale and standardised for head shape and brightness.
- Studied in
- Toxotes chatareus
- Sample size
- individually trained archerfish across two experiments
Fish selected the trained face well above chance, and continued to do so when colour and head-shape cues were removed.
What it means
The authors' reading, and ours. Where they differ, that difference is the point.
How the authors put it
Complex visual discrimination of human faces does not require a neocortex, and can be achieved by a fish with no evolutionary history of needing it.
How NatureHQ reads it
This is the study that makes the capability page worth building. Face discrimination in animals is often explained by pointing at specialised brain regions in mammals and birds; a fish doing it with neither is a genuine problem for that explanation. Two cautions belong with it: the fish were trained on one face rather than recognising people they knew, and "discriminating a face from other faces" is a smaller claim than "knowing who someone is".
- A trained discrimination task, not spontaneous recognition of familiar individuals.
- Faces were flat images on a screen, not people.
- Cannot show whether the fish process faces as faces rather than as complex patterns.
What this study is used for on NatureHQ
One study can inform several subjects. Here is everywhere this one is cited.
Published by: Nature PortfolioPublished in a Nature Portfolio journal.
This reference was resolved automatically against Crossref and OpenAlex on 2026-08-11.
NatureHQ summarises research in its own words and does not reproduce published text. Reviewed 2026-08-09.