Maybe you're falling for the homunculus fallacy in case of humans. But actually there is no little guy watching some screen in our brains, "processing the images".
There's no sharp distinction between reflex-like reactions and "image recognition". It's not even the case that our vision is "full" or "perfect" image processing. There might be all sorts of more complex ways that our vision could work but it doesn't.
If you mean it's misleading because the bacterium doesn't have an inner first-person experience of looking at something, then again this is a philosophical thing, it's not really observable science.
As humans we imagine that we're very efficient processors, and we are...but, much of the time we're very likely just on on "auto-pilot", responding to stimuli...with all the senses...
Example: Say you're driving down the road, feel hungry, and catch a glimpse of Golden Arches ahead...without very much processing at all you pull into a McDonalds and order a meal...birds in the McDonalds parking lot flit around constantly under cars, checking for bits of French fries dropped or discarded...there's not a lot of difference between us and the birds...we're both responding to stimuli in our environment...without much deep thought at all...it keeps us alive...
One of my favorite quotes is one from "The Judge", a character from Cormac McCarthy's novel Blood Meridian...it puts our existence into a unique perspective:
>“The truth about the world, he said, is that anything is possible. Had you not seen it all from birth and thereby bled it of its strangeness it would appear to you for what it is, a hat trick in a medicine show, a fevered dream, a trance bepopulate with chimeras having neither analogue nor precedent, an itinerant carnival, a migratory tentshow whose ultimate destination after many a pitch in many a mudded field is unspeakable and calamitous beyond reckoning."<
There's no high level integration that would allow image recognition, bacteria are AFAIK too simple for that to happen.
They may have a cellular automata-like mechanism to detect where the biggest light source is in case there is more than one, or it is diffuse rather than focused.
One family of single cell eukaryotes has ocelloids[0] reminiscent of vertebrate and mollusc eyes. Provided nuclear genes form networks conceptually identical to neural nets (i.e. brains), one could imagine that these animals have more elaborate image processing, but I don't know if there's any concrete evidence for it.
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[1] http://www.smithsonianmag.com/smart-news/there-are-372-trill...
* Scientists had been looking at bacteria under a microscope for 340 years.
* Just the other day, someone noticed how bacteria focus light.
If you ever think there's nothing interesting left to discover in your field, read this again!
I hope that someone is starting to try and capture images from those mini eyeballs, they then become our mini bio-cameras.
Can this be applied somehow to treat bacterial infections?
