Department of Psychology, University of Toronto Mississauga, Rm CCT4004, 3359 Mississauga Road, Mississauga, Ontario, L5L 1C6, Canada.
Institute of Neuroscience and Physiology, Department of Neurochemistry and Psychiatry, University of Gothenburg, Su Sahlgrenska, 41345, Göteborg, Sweden.
Behav Res Methods. 2024 Feb;56(2):736-749. doi: 10.3758/s13428-023-02076-7. Epub 2023 Feb 22.
The zebrafish is a laboratory species that gained increasing popularity the last decade in a variety of subfields of biology, including toxicology, ecology, medicine, and the neurosciences. An important phenotype often measured in these fields is behaviour. Consequently, numerous new behavioural apparati and paradigms have been developed for the zebrafish, including methods for the analysis of learning and memory in adult zebrafish. Perhaps the biggest obstacle in these methods is that zebrafish is particularly sensitive to human handling. To overcome this confound, automated learning paradigms have been developed with varying success. In this manuscript, we present a semi-automated home tank-based learning/memory test paradigm utilizing visual cues, and show that it is capable of quantifying classical associative learning performance in zebrafish. We demonstrate that in this task, zebrafish successfully acquire the association between coloured-light and food reward. The hardware and software components of the task are easy and cheap to obtain and simple to assemble and set up. The procedures of the paradigm allow the test fish to remain completely undisturbed by the experimenter for several days in their home (test) tank, eliminating human handling or human interference induced stress. We demonstrate that the development of cheap and simple automated home-tank-based learning paradigms for the zebrafish is feasible. We argue that such tasks will allow us to better characterize numerous cognitive and mnemonic features of the zebrafish, including elemental as well as configural learning and memory, which will, in turn, also enhance our ability to study neurobiological mechanisms underlying learning and memory using this model organism.
斑马鱼是一种实验室物种，在过去十年中，它在生物学的多个分支领域（包括毒理学、生态学、医学和神经科学）中越来越受欢迎。在这些领域中，经常测量的一个重要表型是行为。因此，为斑马鱼开发了许多新的行为设备和范式，包括用于分析成年斑马鱼学习和记忆的方法。在这些方法中，最大的障碍之一是斑马鱼对人类处理特别敏感。为了克服这一混淆，已经开发出具有不同成功程度的自动化学习范式。在本手稿中，我们提出了一种基于半自动化家庭水族箱的学习/记忆测试范式，利用视觉线索，并表明它能够定量测量斑马鱼的经典联想学习表现。我们证明，在这项任务中，斑马鱼成功地将颜色光与食物奖励联系起来。任务的硬件和软件组件易于获得且价格低廉，组装和设置简单。该范例的程序允许测试鱼在其家（测试）水箱中完全不受实验者的干扰，从而消除了人为处理或人为干扰引起的压力。我们证明，为斑马鱼开发廉价且简单的自动化家庭水族箱学习范式是可行的。我们认为，这样的任务将使我们能够更好地描述斑马鱼的许多认知和记忆特征，包括元素和配置学习和记忆，这反过来也将增强我们使用这种模式生物研究学习和记忆背后的神经生物学机制的能力。
