Archerfish number discrimination
- University of Trento, Italy
Abstract
Debates have arisen as to whether non-human animals actually can learn abstract non-symbolic numerousness or whether they always rely on some continuous physical aspect of the stimuli, covarying with number. Here we investigated archerfish (Toxotes jaculatrix) non-symbolic numerical discrimination with accurate control for co-varying continuous physical stimulus attributes. Archerfish were trained to select one of two groups of black dots (Exp. 1: 3 vs. 6 elements; Exp. 2: 2 vs. 3 elements); these were controlled for several combinations of physical variables (elements’ size, overall area, overall perimeter, density and sparsity), ensuring that only numerical information was available. Generalization tests with novel numerical comparisons (2 vs. 3, 5 vs. 8 and 6 vs. 9 in Exp. 1; 3 vs. 4, 3 vs. 6 in Exp. 2) revealed choice for the largest or smallest numerical group according to the relative number that was rewarded at training. None of the continuous physical variables, including spatial frequency, were affecting archerfish performance. Results provide evidence that archerfish spontaneously use abstract relative numerical information for both small and large numbers when only numerical cues are available.
Data availability
All data generated or analysed during this study have been deposited in Dryad.
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Numerical discrimination of sets of elements by ArcherfishDryad Digital Repository, doi:10.5061/dryad.4f4qrfjdg.
Article and author information
Author details
Giorgio Vallortigara
Funding
H2020 European Research Council (833504)
- Giorgio Vallortigara
Progetti di Rilevante Interesse Nazionale (2017PSRHPZ)
- Giorgio Vallortigara
The funders had no role in study design, data collection and interpretation, or the decision to submit the work for publication.
Ethics
Animal experimentation: The present research was carried out at the Animal Cognition and Neuroscience Laboratory (ACN Lab) of the CIMeC (Center for Mind/Brain Sciences), at the University of Trento (Italy). All husbandry and experimental procedures complied with European Legislation for the Protection of Animals used for Scientific Purposes (Directive 2010/63/EU) and were approved by the Scientific Committee on Animal Health and Animal Welfare (Organismo Preposto al Benessere Animale, OPBA) of the University of Trento and by the Italian Ministry of Health (Protocol n. 932/2020-PR).
Copyright
© 2022, Potrich et al.
This article is distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License permitting unrestricted use and redistribution provided that the original author and source are credited.
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Archerfish number discrimination
eLife 11:e74057.
https://doi.org/10.7554/eLife.74057
