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Quantity discrimination in angelfish (Pterophyllum scalare) is maintained after a 30-s retention interval in the large but not in the small number range

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Abstract

The ability to discriminate between sets that differ in the number of elements can be useful in different contexts and may have survival and fitness consequences. As such, numerical/quantity discrimination has been demonstrated in a diversity of animal species. In the laboratory, this ability has been analyzed, for example, using binary choice tests. Furthermore, when the different number of items first presented to the subjects are subsequently obscured, i.e., are not visible at the moment of making a choice, the task requires memory for the size of the sets. In previous work, angelfish (Pterophyllum scalare) have been found to be able to discriminate shoals differing in the number of shoal members both in the small (less than 4) and the large (4 or more) number range, and they were able to perform well even when a short memory retention interval (2–15 s) was imposed. In the current study, we increased the retention interval to 30 s during which the shoals to choose between were obscured, and investigated whether angelfish could show preference for the larger shoal they saw before this interval. Subjects were faced with a discrimination between numerically small shoals (≤4 fish) and also between numerically large (≥4 fish) shoals of conspecifics. We found angelfish not to be able to remember the ___location of larger versus smaller shoals in the small number range, but to exhibit significant memory for the larger shoal in the large number range as long as the ratio between these shoals was at least 2:1. These results, together with prior findings, suggest the existence of two separate quantity estimation systems, the object file system for small number of items that does not work with the longer retention interval and the analogue magnitude system for larger number of items that does.

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Funding

This research was supported by grant PSI2013-40768-P from the Ministerio de Economía y Competitividad (Spain) to LMG-L and an NSERC (Canada) Discovery grant to RG.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Psychology, University of Oviedo, Plaza de Feijoo s/n, 33003, Oviedo, Spain

    Luis M. Gómez-Laplaza & Álvaro L. Caicoya

  2. Department of Psychology, University of Toronto Mississauga, 3359 Mississauga Road North, Mississauga, ON, L5L 1C6, Canada

    Robert Gerlai

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  1. Luis M. Gómez-Laplaza
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Correspondence to Luis M. Gómez-Laplaza.

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The experiments described here comply with the current law of the country (Spain) in which they were performed, and were approved by the Committee on the Ethics of Animal Experiments of the University of Oviedo (permit number: 13-INV-2010).

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Gómez-Laplaza, L.M., Caicoya, Á.L. & Gerlai, R. Quantity discrimination in angelfish (Pterophyllum scalare) is maintained after a 30-s retention interval in the large but not in the small number range. Anim Cogn 20, 829–840 (2017). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10071-017-1104-8

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