Comparison between two- and three-dimensional scoring of zebrafish response to psychoactive drugs: identifying when three-dimensional analysis is needed.

Zebrafish () have recently emerged as a valuable laboratory species in the field of behavioral pharmacology, where they afford rapid and precise high-throughput drug screening. Although the behavioral repertoire of this species manifests along three-dimensional (3D), most of the efforts in behavioral pharmacology rely on two-dimensional (2D) projections acquired from a single overhead or front camera. We recently showed that, compared to a 3D scoring approach, 2D analyses could lead to inaccurate claims regarding individual and social behavior of drug-free experimental subjects.

Design and development of a robotic predator as a stimulus in conditioned place aversion for the study of the effect of ethanol and citalopram in zebrafish.

Zebrafish are becoming a species of choice in psychopharmacology, laying a promising path to refined pharmacological manipulations and high-throughput behavioral phenotyping. The field of robotics has the potential to accelerate progress along this path, by offering unprecedented means for the design and development of accurate and reliable experimental stimuli. In this work, we demonstrate, for the first time, the integration of robotic predators in place conditioning experiments.

A Comparison of Individual Learning and Social Learning in Zebrafish Through an Ethorobotics Approach.

Social learning is ubiquitous across the animal kingdom, where animals learn from group members about predators, foraging strategies, and so on. Despite its prevalence and adaptive benefits, our understanding of social learning is far from complete. Here, we study observational learning in zebrafish, a popular animal model in neuroscience.

The Tagging Procedure of Visible Implant Elastomers Influences Zebrafish Individual and Social Behavior.

One commonly used method to preserve individual identity in the study of social behavior of zebrafish is through silicone-based visible implant elastomers (VIEs), which represent a safe and durable tagging procedure. While the effects of VIE tagging on welfare and general health have been addressed in detail, whether this procedure influences social behavior remains unclear. In this study, we compared individual and group behaviors exhibited by shoals composed of three individuals: two nontagged and one (focal subject) that was either nontagged (control condition) or sham-, purple-, blue-, or yellow tagged.

Collective cognition in humans: groups outperform their best members in a sentence reconstruction task.

Group-living is widespread among animals and one of the major advantages of group-living is the ability of groups to solve cognitive problems that exceed individual ability. Humans also make use of collective cognition and have simultaneously developed a highly complex language to exchange information. Here we investigated collective cognition of human groups regarding language use in a realistic situation.