Gatto Elia, Santacà Maria, Verza Ilaria, Dadda Marco, Bisazza Angelo
Department of General Psychology, University of Padova, Via Venezia 8, 35131 Padova, Italy.
Padua Neuroscience Center-PNC, University of Padova, Via Giuseppe Orus 2, 35131 Padova, Italy.
Animals (Basel). 2021 May 14;11(5):1397. doi: 10.3390/ani11051397.
The growing use of teleosts in comparative cognition and in neurobiological research has prompted many researchers to develop automated conditioning devices for fish. These techniques can make research less expensive and fully comparable with research on warm-blooded species, in which automated devices have been used for more than a century. Tested with a recently developed automated device, guppies () easily performed 80 reinforced trials per session, exceeding 80% accuracy in color or shape discrimination tasks after only 3-4 training session, though they exhibit unexpectedly poor performance in numerical discrimination tasks. As several pieces of evidence indicate, guppies possess excellent numerical abilities. In the first part of this study, we benchmarked the automated training device with a standard manual training procedure by administering the same set of tasks, which consisted of numerical discriminations of increasing difficulty. All manually-trained guppies quickly learned the easiest discriminations and a substantial percentage learned the more difficult ones, such as 4 vs. 5 items. No fish trained with the automated conditioning device reached the learning criterion for even the easiest discriminations. In the second part of the study, we introduced a series of modifications to the conditioning chamber and to the procedure in an attempt to improve its efficiency. Increasing the decision time, inter-trial interval, or visibility of the stimuli did not produce an appreciable improvement. Reducing the cognitive load of the task by training subjects first to use the device with shape and color discriminations, significantly improved their numerical performance. Allowing the subjects to reside in the test chamber, which likely reduced the amount of attentional resources subtracted to task execution, also led to an improvement, although in no case did subjects match the performance of fish trained with the standard procedure. Our results highlight limitations in the capacity of small laboratory teleosts to cope with operant conditioning automation that was not observed in laboratory mammals and birds and that currently prevent an easy and straightforward comparison with other vertebrates.
硬骨鱼在比较认知和神经生物学研究中的使用日益增加，促使许多研究人员为鱼类开发自动条件装置。这些技术可以降低研究成本，并使其与对温血动物的研究完全可比，而自动装置在温血动物研究中已经使用了一个多世纪。用最近开发的自动装置进行测试时，孔雀鱼（）每次实验轻松完成80次强化试验，在仅经过3 - 4次训练后，在颜色或形状辨别任务中的准确率超过80%，尽管它们在数字辨别任务中的表现出人意料地差。有几条证据表明，孔雀鱼具有出色的数字能力。在本研究的第一部分，我们通过执行同一组任务，用标准手动训练程序对自动训练装置进行了基准测试，这些任务包括难度不断增加的数字辨别。所有手动训练的孔雀鱼很快学会了最简单的辨别，相当大比例的孔雀鱼学会了更难的辨别，比如4对5的辨别。没有一条用自动条件装置训练的鱼达到即使是最简单辨别的学习标准。在研究的第二部分，我们对条件箱和程序进行了一系列修改，试图提高其效率。增加决策时间、试验间隔或刺激的可见性并没有产生明显的改善。通过首先训练受试者使用该装置进行形状和颜色辨别来减轻任务的认知负荷，显著提高了它们的数字表现。让受试者留在测试箱中，这可能减少了执行任务所消耗的注意力资源，也导致了性能的提高，尽管在任何情况下，受试者的表现都无法与用标准程序训练的鱼相匹配。我们的结果凸显了小型实验室硬骨鱼应对操作性条件自动化能力的局限性，这种局限性在实验室哺乳动物和鸟类中并未观察到，并且目前阻碍了与其他脊椎动物进行轻松直接的比较。
