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Media type:
E-Article
Title:
Fish can infer relations between colour cues in a non-social learning task
Contributor:
La Loggia, Océane;
Rüfenacht, Angélique;
Taborsky, Barbara
imprint:
The Royal Society, 2022
Published in:
Biology Letters, 18 (2022) 11
Language:
English
DOI:
10.1098/rsbl.2022.0321
ISSN:
1744-957X
Origination:
Footnote:
Description:
<jats:p>Transitive inference (TI) describes the ability to infer relationships between stimuli that have never been seen together before. Social cichlids can use TI in a social setting where observers assess dominance status after witnessing contests between different dyads of conspecifics. If cognitive processes are domain-general, animals should use abilities evolved in a social context also in a non-social context. Therefore, if TI is domain-general in fish, social fish should also be able to use TI in non-social tasks. Here we tested whether the cooperatively breeding cichlid<jats:italic>Neolamprologus pulcher</jats:italic>can infer transitive relationships between artificial stimuli in a non-social context. We used an associative learning paradigm where the fish received a food reward when correctly solving a colour discrimination task. Eleven of 12 subjects chose the predicted outcome for TI in the first test trial and five subjects performed with 100% accuracy in six successive test trials. We found no evidence that the fish solved the TI task by value transfer. Our findings show that fish also use TI in non-social tasks with artificial stimuli, thus generalizing past results reported in a social context and hinting toward a domain-general cognitive mechanism.</jats:p>