Acquisition and social communication of stimulus recognition by Fish.

In fish, behavior commonly designated as Pavlovian and/or instrumental conditioning, imprinting, and social learning often appears to reflect a phylogenetically adapted operation of a single underlying learning mechanism, a version of stimulus substitution. In this mechanism, a releasing stimulus comes to share control over the release of behavior with a previously neutral stimulus. In addition, control over the direction of released responses is simultaneously transferred. The outcome, as supported by review of the literature, is that recognition learning in fish seems to involve primarily the extension to new stimuli of control over the elicitation of preorganized unlearned responses.