Abstract:

Teleosts engage in diverse social activities, ranging from the highly gregarious zebrafish to the solitary Siamese fighting fish. When presented with conspecifics, these social tendencies produce stereotyped behaviours: zebrafish shoal towards their conspecifics, while fighting fish engage in aggressive displays. Under certain conditions, these behavioural patterns are sufficiently robust to support visual psychophysics and demonstrate complex visual capabilities that far exceed what is known about neural selectivity in these animals. For example, both species can discriminate between moving stimuli that are consistent as opposed to inconsistent with natural patterns, in the absence of low-level cues. The configural nature of these perceptual processes is reminiscent of how mammals represent socially relevant signals, notwithstanding the lack of cortical structures that are widely recognized to play a critical role in higher cognitive processes. These behavioural results indicate that complex visual analysis may be more cohesive and integrated than envisaged by hierarchical views, so that what are termed `low-level’ and `higher-level’ may be implemented by, and co-exist within, relatively small circuits. Furthermore, our results suggest that mammalian-centric accounts of social cognition present serious conceptual limitations, and in so doing they highlight the importance of understanding complex perceptual function from a general ethological perspective.

Photo by zhengtao tang on Unsplash

This talk will take place in person at SCIoI.

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