Lateralization correlates with individual differences in inhibitory control in zebrafish

Abstract

Individual fitness often depends on the ability to inhibit behaviours not adapted to a given situation. However, inhibitory control can vary greatly between individuals of the same species. We investigated a mechanism that might maintain this variability in zebrafish ( Danio rerio ). We demonstrate that inhibitory control correlates with cerebral lateralization, the tendency to process information with one brain hemisphere or the other. Individuals that preferentially observed a social stimulus with the right eye and thus processed social information with the left brain hemisphere, inhibited foraging behaviour more efficiently. Therefore, selective pressures that maintain lateralization variability in populations might provide indirect selection for variability in inhibitory control. Our study suggests that individual cognitive differences may result from complex multi-trait selection mechanisms.

Heterogeneity of performances in several inhibitory control tasks: male rhesus macaques are more easily distracted than females

“…Inconsistent effect of age and sex could also be due to our small sample size. However, studies looking specifically at individual differences in guppies had a sample size going from 22 to 28 individuals [30][31][32]37,101]. A low sample size, a common limitation when working with primates, might have decreased the power of our analysis [112].…”

“…When all the sessions were taken together, males were more distracted by the pictures. In the literature, better inhibitory control skills in females were also found in the go/no-go task [ 52 , 53 ] and in other tasks of inhibition of an action such as the cylinder task [ 32 ] and the tube task [ 31 , 32 ]. Similar findings were also found in a task of cognition inhibition, the reversal-learning task [ 37 ].…”

“…For instance, in guppies (Poecilia reticulata), researchers reported individual differences in two measures of inhibition of action. In these tasks, subjects needed to inhibit reaching directly for a prey through a transparent glass tube [30][31][32] or through a transparent cylinder [32]. Similarly, pheasants (Phasianus colchicus) displayed a great individual variability in a response inhibition task in which the subjects were required to adjust their movement while pursuing a moving target [33].…”

Smart mating: the cognitive ability of females influences their preference for male cognitive ability

“…In late May, when the males had started ( N = 10) or finished nest construction ( N = 12), the cognitive performance of all survived fish ( N = 22 males and 20 females) was evaluated in a simple detour-reaching task in which the fish needed to find the entrance to reach the food. Detour tasks using transparent barriers are commonly used in animals, including fish, to test individual ability to access a reward that can be seen but is not directly accessible, and provide strong predictive measures of inhibitory control skills ( Vlamings et al 2010 ; MacLean et al 2013 ; Lucon-Xiccato et al 2020 ). Thus, fish needed to inhibit the impulse to reach for the food directly, bumping into the transparent barrier, to successfully retrieve the reward ( MacLean et al 2014 ; Minter et al 2017 ; Kabadayi et al 2018 ).…”

Comparison of anxiety-like and social behaviour in medaka and zebrafish

“…The time spent by the subject in close proximity to the social stimulus is taken as a measure of sociability. Other versions of the sociability test involve the use of a mirror as stimulus 24 , 27 , 28 . If tested in a novel environment, the fish initially tend to show a strong affiliation response to their mirror image, which is probably perceived as a conspecific 24 , 27 , 28 .…”