ISSN:
1432-1351
Keywords:
Goldfish
;
Discrimination learning
;
Visual processing
;
Compound visual stimulus
Source:
Springer Online Journal Archives 1860-2000
Topics:
Biology
,
Medicine
Notes:
Summary To examine how goldfish process and store information on compound visual stimuli, goldfish were trained with visual discriminative stimuli composed of varied colors and patterns using a Y-maze instrumental conditioning technique. The fish showed some very different types of information processing patterns depending upon the degree of discrimination difficulty of each constituent aspect (color and pattern). Those trained with compound stimuli with both a more easily discriminated aspect and a more difficult aspect learned the former selectively but did not learn the latter at all in spite of a high rate of training. Contrary to this, the fish trained with compound stimuli composed of two aspects with similar degrees of discrimination difficulty learned both aspects. In this case, only when fish were trained with compound stimuli composed of relatively more difficult aspects did they learn to discriminate between the stimuli more rapidly than the fish in each group trained with the constituent colored or patterned stimuli. These results were discussed in relation to visual processing patterns reported in other species and the mechanism of aspect selection.
Type of Medium:
Electronic Resource
URL:
http://dx.doi.org/10.1007/BF00215080
