Many mammals and birds can recognise individual humans, as well as some insects (did you know honeybees and cockroaches can, presumably using olfaction?), but the generality of human recognition abilities in invertebrates is unclear.
In 2010, however, a group of scientists proved that octopuses can remember how individual people treated them, hence demonstrating they can discriminate between human individuals.
The pdf of the study report is available here.
The experiment
Obviously, responses that might indicate recognition of individual humans will not be the same as those used for vertebrate subjects. So how did they proceed ?
In short, two different individuals went daily to 8 pacific octopuses and either fed them or poked them with a stick to annoy them. Each time, various parameters were recorded, such as the respiration, the presence/absence of an eyebar, the skin color, the direction of the funnel...
After a week, the results were statistically relevant: octopuses behave differently in the presence of the annoyer or the feeder.
The conclusions
This proves once more how intelligent those creatures are and is a nice reminder that a two-way relationship may form between pairs as phylogenetically distant as humans and octopuses.
Side-note
Moreover, what I found incredible in this experiment is that octopuses seem need only visual clues to recognise us. Let me remind you that they don’t perceive colours... so how the heck do they do that ? Below is a picture of the two testers. Now imagine it in black and white. Not so easy, right ?
We’ve found an app that can recognize any humans using the Android camera. We’re hoping to accomplish our first major milestone this week by having the drone follow a human by looking at him while hovering.
