Lee Sang Ah, Ferrari Ambra, Vallortigara Giorgio, Sovrano Valeria Anna
Center for Mind/Brain Sciences, University of Trento, Rovereto, Italy.
Center for Mind/Brain Sciences, University of Trento, Rovereto, Italy.
Behav Processes. 2015 Oct;119:116-22. doi: 10.1016/j.beproc.2015.07.012. Epub 2015 Jul 31.
The ability to map locations in the surrounding environment is crucial for any navigating animal. Decades of research on mammalian spatial representations suggest that environmental boundaries play a major role in both navigation behavior and hippocampal place coding. Although the capacity for spatial mapping is shared among vertebrates, including birds and fish, it is not yet clear whether such similarities in competence reflect common underlying mechanisms. The present study tests cue specificity in spatial mapping in zebrafish, by probing their use of various visual cues to encode the location of a nearby conspecific. The results suggest that untrained zebrafish, like other vertebrates tested so far, rely primarily on environmental boundaries to compute spatial relationships and, at the same time, use other visible features such as surface markings and freestanding objects as local cues to goal locations. We propose that the pattern of specificity in spontaneous spatial mapping behavior across vertebrates reveals cross-species commonalities in its underlying neural representations.
对任何进行导航的动物来说，绘制周围环境中位置的能力都至关重要。数十年来对哺乳动物空间表征的研究表明，环境边界在导航行为和海马体位置编码中都起着主要作用。尽管包括鸟类和鱼类在内的脊椎动物都具备空间绘图能力，但这种能力上的相似性是否反映了共同的潜在机制尚不清楚。本研究通过探究斑马鱼对各种视觉线索的使用情况，以编码附近同种个体的位置，来测试斑马鱼空间绘图中的线索特异性。结果表明，未经训练的斑马鱼与迄今测试过的其他脊椎动物一样，主要依靠环境边界来计算空间关系，同时利用其他可见特征，如表面标记和独立物体作为目标位置的局部线索。我们认为，脊椎动物自发空间绘图行为中的特异性模式揭示了其潜在神经表征中的跨物种共性。
