Yashina Ksenia, Tejero-Cantero Álvaro, Herz Andreas, Baier Herwig
Max Planck Institute of Neurobiology, Martinsried 82152, Germany; Graduate School of Systemic Neurosciences, Martinsried 82152, Germany.
Faculty of Biology, Ludwig Maximilians University, Martinsried 82152, Germany; Bernstein Center for Computational Neuroscience, Martinsried 82152, Germany.
iScience. 2019 Sep 27;19:119-134. doi: 10.1016/j.isci.2019.07.013. Epub 2019 Jul 15.
Animals use salient cues to navigate in their environment, but their specific cognitive strategies are largely unknown. We developed a conditioned place avoidance paradigm to discover whether and how zebrafish form spatial memories. In less than an hour, juvenile zebrafish, as young as 3 weeks, learned to avoid the arm of a Y-maze that was cued with a mild electric shock. Interestingly, individual fish solved this task in different ways: by staying in the safe center of the maze or by preference for one, or both, of the safe arms. In experiments in which the learned patterns were swapped, rotated, or replaced, the animals could transfer the association of safety to a different arm or to a different pattern using either visual cues or location as the conditioned stimulus. These findings show that juvenile zebrafish exhibit several complementary spatial learning modes, which generate a flexible repertoire of behavioral strategies.
动物利用显著线索在其环境中导航，但其具体的认知策略在很大程度上尚不清楚。我们开发了一种条件性位置回避范式，以发现斑马鱼是否以及如何形成空间记忆。在不到一小时的时间里，年仅3周的幼年斑马鱼学会了避开Y型迷宫中用轻微电击作为线索提示的臂。有趣的是，个体鱼以不同方式解决了这项任务：通过待在迷宫的安全中心，或者偏好一个或两个安全臂。在学习模式被交换、旋转或替换的实验中，动物可以使用视觉线索或位置作为条件刺激，将安全关联转移到不同的臂或不同的模式。这些发现表明，幼年斑马鱼表现出几种互补的空间学习模式，这些模式产生了灵活的行为策略库。
