Miletto Petrazzini Maria Elena, Bisazza Angelo, Agrillo Christian, Lucon-Xiccato Tyrone
Dipartimento di Psicologia Generale, Università di Padova, Via Venezia 8, 35131, Padua, Italy.
Anim Cogn. 2017 Nov;20(6):1081-1091. doi: 10.1007/s10071-017-1124-4. Epub 2017 Aug 8.
In several mammalian and avian species, females show a higher performance than males in tasks requiring cognitive flexibility such as the discrimination reversal learning. A recent study showed that female guppies are twice as efficient as males in a reversal learning task involving yellow-red discrimination, suggesting a higher cognitive flexibility in female guppies. However, the possibility exists that the superior performance exhibited by females does not reflect a general sex difference in cognitive abilities, but instead, is confined to colour discrimination tasks. To address this issue, we compared male and female guppies in two different discrimination reversal learning tasks and we performed a meta-analysis of these experiments and the previous one involving colour discrimination. In the first experiment of this study, guppies were tested in a task requiring them to learn to select the correct arm of a T-maze in order to rejoin a group of conspecifics. In experiment 2, guppies were observed in a numerical task requiring them to discriminate between 5 and 10 dots in order to obtain a food reward. Although females outperformed males in one condition of the T-maze, we did not find any clear evidence of females' greater reversal learning performance in either experiment. However, the meta-analysis of the three experiments supported the hypothesis of females' greater reversal learning ability. Our data do not completely exclude the idea that female guppies have a generally higher cognitive flexibility than males; however, they suggest that the size of this sex difference might depend on the task.
在几种哺乳动物和鸟类物种中，在需要认知灵活性的任务（如辨别逆转学习）中，雌性比雄性表现更优。最近一项研究表明，在涉及黄红辨别的逆转学习任务中，雌性孔雀鱼的效率是雄性的两倍，这表明雌性孔雀鱼具有更高的认知灵活性。然而，雌性表现出的卓越表现有可能并不反映认知能力上普遍的性别差异，而是仅限于颜色辨别任务。为了解决这个问题，我们在两项不同的辨别逆转学习任务中比较了雄性和雌性孔雀鱼，并对这些实验以及之前涉及颜色辨别的实验进行了荟萃分析。在本研究的第一个实验中，孔雀鱼接受一项任务测试，要求它们学会选择T型迷宫的正确臂以重新加入一群同种个体。在实验2中，观察孔雀鱼在一项数字任务中的表现，要求它们辨别5个和10个点以获得食物奖励。尽管在T型迷宫的一种情况下雌性表现优于雄性，但在任何一个实验中我们都没有找到明确证据表明雌性在逆转学习表现上更出色。然而，对这三个实验的荟萃分析支持了雌性具有更强逆转学习能力的假设。我们的数据并未完全排除雌性孔雀鱼普遍比雄性具有更高认知灵活性的观点；然而，它们表明这种性别差异的大小可能取决于任务。
