Skip to main content
Dryad

Data for: Fish can infer relations between colour cues in a non-social learning task

Data files

Nov 01, 2022 version files 356.34 KB

Abstract

Transitive inference (TI) describes the ability to infer relationships between stimuli that have never been seen together before. Social cichlids can use TI in a social setting where observers assess dominance status after witnessing contests between different dyads of conspecifics. If cognitive processes are domain-general, animals should use abilities evolved in a social context also in a non-social context. Therefore, if TI is domain-general in fish, social fish should be able to use TI also in non-social tasks. Here we tested whether the cooperatively-breeding cichlid Neolamprologus pulcher can infer transitive relationships between artificial stimuli in a non-social context. We used an associative learning paradigm where the fish received a food reward when correctly solving a colour discrimination task. Eleven of twelve subjects chose the predicted outcome for TI in the first test trial and five subjects performed with 100% accuracy in six successive test trials. We found no evidence that the fish solved the TI task by value transfer. Our findings show that fish use TI also in non-social tasks with artificial stimuli, thus generalizing past results reported in a social context and hinting toward a domain-general cognitive mechanism.