Pubblicazione scientifica

Symbol-value association and discrimination in the archerfish

FILONE TECNOLOGICO	TEMA
trasformazione e commercializzazione	certificazione e marchi di qualità

RIASSUNTO

One of the most important aspects of mathematical cognition in humans is the ability to symbolically represent magnitudes and quantities. In the last 20 years it has been shown that not only humans but also other primates, birds and dolphins can use symbolic representation of quantities. However, it remains unclear to what extent this ability is spread across the animal kingdom. Here, by training archerfish to associate variable amounts of rewards with different geometric shapes, we show for the first time that lower vertebrates can also associate a value with a symbol and make a decision that maximizes their food intake based on this information. In addition, the archerfish is able to understand up to four different quantities and organize them mentally in an ordinal manner, similar to observations in higher vertebrates. These findings point in the direction of the existence of an approximate magnitude system in fish.

DATA

Data di pubblicazione: 05/04/2017

AUTORI

KAROUBI NAOMI
LEIBOVICH TALI
SEGEV RONEN

ENTE DI AFFERENZA

LIFE SCIENCES DEPT & ZLOTOWSKI CTR NEUROSCIENCE BEN GURION UNIV NEGEV BEER SHEVA ISRAEL
PSYCHOLOGY DEPT & BRAIN & MIND INST UNIV WESTERN ONTARIO LONDON CANADA
UNIV DEGLI STUDI DI PADOVA ITALY

RIVISTA

PLoS ONE, 12(4), e0174044

IMPACT FACTOR

2,870

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