Fish can infer relations between colour cues in a non-social learning task.

La Loggia, Océane; Rüfenacht, Angélique; Taborsky, Barbara (2022). Fish can infer relations between colour cues in a non-social learning task. Biology Letters, 18(11), p. 20220321. The Royal Society 10.1098/rsbl.2022.0321

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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 also be able to use TI 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 12 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 also use TI in non-social tasks with artificial stimuli, thus generalizing past results reported in a social context and hinting toward a domain-general cognitive mechanism.

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