Crayfish Recognize the Faces of Fight Opponents

Abstract

The capacity to associate stimuli underlies many cognitive abilities, including recognition, in humans and other animals. Vertebrates process different categories of information separately and then reassemble the distilled information for unique identification, storage and recall. Invertebrates have fewer neural networks and fewer neural processing options so study of their behavior may reveal underlying mechanisms still not fully understood for any animal. Some invertebrates form complex social colonies and are capable of visual memory-bees and wasps, for example. This ability would not be predicted in species that interact in random pairs without strong social cohesion; for example, crayfi..