Fish can infer social rank by observation alone
Fish can infer social rank by observation alone
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DOI：
10.1038/nature05511
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发表时间：
2007-01-25
期刊：
影响因子：
64.8
通讯作者：
Fernald, Russell D.
中科院分区：
文献类型：
--
作者：
Grosenick, Logan;Clement, Tricia S.;Fernald, Russell D.
传递推理（TI）涉及使用已知的关系来推断未知的关系（例如，使用a.b和b.c来推断a.c），因此对逻辑推理是必不可少的。TI最初被描述为儿童的一个发育里程碑(1)，后来在非人灵长类动物（2-4）、大鼠（5,6）和鸟类（7-10）中也有报道。然而，动物是如何获得和表现传递关系的，以及为什么这种能力会进化，仍然是一个悬而未决的问题。在这里，我们展示了雄性鱼（burtoni Astatotilapia）可以成功地推断出竞争对手之间的成对战斗所暗示的等级制度。这些鱼以“旁观者”的身份间接地学习了隐含的等级制度，通过观看在不同的坦克单元中排列在它们周围的对手之间的战斗。我们的研究结果表明，鱼在接受社会相关刺激训练时使用TI，并且它们可以通过单独使用间接信息来进行这种推断。此外，这些旁观者似乎拥有与竞争能力相关的空间表征和特征表征，他们可以利用这些表征来做出正确的推断，这取决于他们可以获得什么样的信息。除了将TI扩展到鱼类和实验证明动物的间接TI学习之外，这些结果表明，TI的普遍机制不太可能存在。相反，动物可能会使用多种特定领域的表征，以适应它们在自然生活过程中遇到的不同社会和生态压力。
Transitive inference (TI) involves using known relationships to deduce unknown ones ( for example, using A. B and B. C to infer A. C), and is thus essential to logical reasoning. First described as a developmental milestone in children(1), TI has since been reported in nonhuman primates(2-4), rats(5,6) and birds(7-10). Still, how animals acquire and represent transitive relationships and why such abilities might have evolved remain open problems. Here we show that male fish (Astatotilapia burtoni) can successfully make inferences on a hierarchy implied by pairwise fights between rival males. These fish learned the implied hierarchy vicariously ( as 'bystanders'), by watching fights between rivals arranged around them in separate tank units. Our findings show that fish use TI when trained on socially relevant stimuli, and that they can make such inferences by using indirect information alone. Further, these bystanders seem to have both spatial and featural representations related to rival abilities, which they can use to make correct inferences depending on what kind of information is available to them. Beyond extending TI to fish and experimentally demonstrating indirect TI learning in animals, these results indicate that a universal mechanism underlying TI is unlikely. Rather, animals probably use multiple domain-specific representations adapted to different social and ecological pressures that they encounter during the course of their natural lives.