Special Issue "Current Progress in Fish Cognition and Behaviour"

A special issue of Animals (ISSN 2076-2615). This special issue belongs to the section "Aquatic Animals".

Deadline for manuscript submissions: 31 December 2021.

Special Issue Editors

Dr. Maria Elena Miletto Petrazzini
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Guest Editor
School of Biological and Chemical Science, Queen Mary University of London, London E1 4NS, UK
Interests: brain lateralization; animal behaviour; comparative cognition; fish
Prof. Vera Schluessel
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Guest Editor
Universität Bonn, Bonn, Germany

Special Issue Information

Dear Colleagues,

The study of animal behaviour and cognition has traditionally focused on mammals and birds, whereas fish have been largely overlooked. This has partially been due to the common misconception that fish are more instinct-driven creatures that only display a series of simple actions in response to environmental stimuli. However, fish represent half of the vertebrate species on the planet and have adapted to living in almost every aquatic niche. Consequently, in order to cope with social and physical changing environments, fish—like all other animals—need to adjust their behaviour accordingly.
In recent years, there has been an upsurge in behavioural and cognitive studies showing that fish possess cognitive abilities and exhibit sophisticated behaviours that were previously believed to be uniquely present in mammals and birds. Despite it being quite clear that the evolutionary success of fish is largely due to their adaptive capabilities in behaviour and cognition, fish as a group still remain vastly underrepresented in regard to this type of research when compared to other vertebrates.
Original contributions from different research areas related to any aspect of fish cognition and behaviour are invited to this Special Issue, which aims to review current work and to suggest future directions in this field.

Dr. Maria Elena Miletto Petrazzini
Prof. Vera Schluessel
Guest Editors

Manuscript Submission Information

Manuscripts should be submitted online at www.mdpi.com by registering and logging in to this website. Once you are registered, click here to go to the submission form. Manuscripts can be submitted until the deadline. All papers will be peer-reviewed. Accepted papers will be published continuously in the journal (as soon as accepted) and will be listed together on the special issue website. Research articles, review articles as well as short communications are invited. For planned papers, a title and short abstract (about 100 words) can be sent to the Editorial Office for announcement on this website.

Submitted manuscripts should not have been published previously, nor be under consideration for publication elsewhere (except conference proceedings papers). All manuscripts are thoroughly refereed through a single-blind peer-review process. A guide for authors and other relevant information for submission of manuscripts is available on the Instructions for Authors page. Animals is an international peer-reviewed open access monthly journal published by MDPI.

Please visit the Instructions for Authors page before submitting a manuscript. The Article Processing Charge (APC) for publication in this open access journal is 1800 CHF (Swiss Francs). Submitted papers should be well formatted and use good English. Authors may use MDPI's English editing service prior to publication or during author revisions.

Keywords

  • fish
  • cognition
  • behaviour
  • laboratory studies
  • field studies
  • evolution
  • adaptation
  • brain

Published Papers (2 papers)

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Research

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Article
Automated Operant Conditioning Devices for Fish. Do They Work?
Animals 2021, 11(5), 1397; https://doi.org/10.3390/ani11051397 - 14 May 2021
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Abstract
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 [...] Read more.
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 (Poecilia reticulata) 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. Full article
(This article belongs to the Special Issue Current Progress in Fish Cognition and Behaviour)
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Review

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Review
Spatial Cognition in Teleost Fish: Strategies and Mechanisms
Animals 2021, 11(8), 2271; https://doi.org/10.3390/ani11082271 - 31 Jul 2021
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Abstract
Teleost fish have been traditionally considered primitive vertebrates compared to mammals and birds in regard to brain complexity and behavioral functions. However, an increasing amount of evidence suggests that teleosts show advanced cognitive capabilities including spatial navigation skills that parallel those of land [...] Read more.
Teleost fish have been traditionally considered primitive vertebrates compared to mammals and birds in regard to brain complexity and behavioral functions. However, an increasing amount of evidence suggests that teleosts show advanced cognitive capabilities including spatial navigation skills that parallel those of land vertebrates. Teleost fish rely on a multiplicity of sensory cues and can use a variety of spatial strategies for navigation, ranging from relatively simple body-centered orientation responses to allocentric or “external world-centered” navigation, likely based on map-like relational memory representations of the environment. These distinct spatial strategies are based on separate brain mechanisms. For example, a crucial brain center for egocentric orientation in teleost fish is the optic tectum, which can be considered an essential hub in a wider brain network responsible for the generation of egocentrically referenced actions in space. In contrast, other brain centers, such as the dorsolateral telencephalic pallium of teleost fish, considered homologue to the hippocampal pallium of land vertebrates, seem to be crucial for allocentric navigation based on map-like spatial memory. Such hypothetical relational memory representations endow fish’s spatial behavior with considerable navigational flexibility, allowing them, for example, to perform shortcuts and detours. Full article
(This article belongs to the Special Issue Current Progress in Fish Cognition and Behaviour)
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