Gjinaj Gabriela, Dadda Marco, Miletto Petrazzini Maria Elena
Department of General Psychology, University of Padova, Via Venezia 8, 35131 Padova, Italy.
Department of Biomedical Sciences, University of Padova, Via Ugo Bassi 58/B, 35131 Padova, Italy.
Animals (Basel). 2025 Jul 1;15(13):1936. doi: 10.3390/ani15131936.
Cognitive abilities in fish have been widely demonstrated using experimental protocols commonly adopted with mammals and birds. Only a few studies have tested fish in the simultaneous match-to-sample task (sMTS), and mixed evidence regarding their capacity to solve the task has been reported. Here we investigated whether guppies () could discriminate stimuli based on their sameness in the sMTS where fish presented with a sample stimulus had to choose which of two simultaneously presented comparison stimuli matched it. We also assessed how performance was influenced by the training set size and stimulus type. Three experiments were conducted using three different sets of stimuli: two colors (red and green), two geometric shapes (circle vs. triangle); and multiple shapes. Performance was analyzed using binomial tests, t-tests, and generalized linear mixed models. The results showed that guppies learned to select the rewarding stimulus in a relatively limited number of trials and were successful in all experiments. Although no effect of the training set size was observed, guppies were more accurate when multiple stimuli were used. These findings support previous evidence suggesting that multiple training stimuli may improve generalization abilities and set the basis for future studies that adopt a delayed version of the task.
鱼类的认知能力已通过通常用于哺乳动物和鸟类的实验方案得到广泛证明。只有少数研究在同时匹配样本任务（sMTS）中对鱼类进行了测试，并且关于它们解决该任务能力的证据不一。在这里，我们研究了孔雀鱼是否能够在sMTS中根据刺激的相同性来区分刺激，在该任务中，向鱼类呈现一个样本刺激后，它们必须选择两个同时呈现的比较刺激中与之匹配的那个。我们还评估了训练集大小和刺激类型对表现的影响。使用三组不同的刺激进行了三个实验：两种颜色（红色和绿色）、两种几何形状（圆形与三角形）；以及多种形状。使用二项式检验、t检验和广义线性混合模型对表现进行了分析。结果表明，孔雀鱼在相对较少的试验次数中学会了选择奖励刺激，并且在所有实验中都取得了成功。尽管未观察到训练集大小的影响，但当使用多种刺激时，孔雀鱼的准确性更高。这些发现支持了先前的证据，表明多种训练刺激可能会提高泛化能力，并为未来采用该任务延迟版本的研究奠定基础。
