Transitive inference in cleaner wrasses (Labroides dimidiatus)

Takashi Hotta, Kentaro Ueno, Yuya Hataji, Hika Kuroshima, Kazuo Fujita and Masanori Kohda

PLOS ONE, 2020, vol. 15, issue 8, 1-13

Abstract: Transitive inference (TI) is the ability to infer unknown relationships from previous information. To test TI in non-human animals, transitive responding has been examined in a TI task where non-adjacent pairs were presented after premise pair training. Some mammals, birds and paper wasps can pass TI tasks. Although previous studies showed that some fish are capable of TI in the social context, it remains unclear whether fish can pass TI task. Here, we conducted a TI task in cleaner wrasses (Labroides dimidiatus), which interact with various client fishes and conspecifics. Because they make decisions based on previous direct and indirect interactions in the context of cleaning interactions, we predicted that the ability of TI is beneficial for cleaner fish. Four tested fish were trained with four pairs of visual stimuli in a 5-term series: A-B+, B-C+, C-D+, and D-E+ (plus and minus denote rewards and non-rewards, respectively). After training, a novel pair, BD (BD test), was presented wherein the fish chose D more frequently than B. In contrast, reinforcement history did not predict the choice D. Our results suggest that cleaner fish passed the TI task, similar to mammals and birds. Although the mechanism underlying transitive responding in cleaner fish remains unclear, this work contributes to understanding cognitive abilities in fish.

Date: 2020
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0237817 (text/html)
https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article/file?id= ... 37817&type=printable (application/pdf)

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:plo:pone00:0237817

DOI: 10.1371/journal.pone.0237817

Access Statistics for this article

More articles in PLOS ONE from Public Library of Science
Bibliographic data for series maintained by plosone (plosone@plos.org).