Social information use in threat perception: Social buffering, contagion and facilitation of alarm responses

Oliveira, Rui Filipe; Faustino, Ana I.

doi:10.1080/19420889.2017.1325049

Cited by 27 publications

(25 citation statements)

References 36 publications

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“…Studies have demonstrated that group housed zebrafish recover more quickly from fin clipping than those held individually [76] and that fear responses are reduced when zebrafish have olfactory and more importantly visual cues of conspecifics [77,78]. This phenomenon is termed social buffering where social support assists in reducing responses to threatening stimuli or events and appears evolutionarily conserved from fish to mammals [77,78]. Thus, it is conceivable that if we repeated these experiments in group housed zebrafish we may see a lesser or no change in the complexity of movement.…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Welfare Challenges Influence the Complexity of Movement: Fractal Analysis of Behaviour in Zebrafish

Deakin

Spencer

Cossins

et al. 2019

Fishes

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The ability to assess welfare is an important refinement that will ensure the good condition of animals used in experimentation. The present study investigated the impact of invasive procedures on the patterns of movement of zebrafish (Danio rerio). Recordings were made before and after fin clipping, PIT tagging and a standard pain test and these were compared with control and sham handled zebrafish. The fractal dimension (FD) from the 3D trajectories was calculated to determine the effect of these treatments on the complexity of movement patterns. While the FD of zebrafish trajectories did not differ over time in either the control or sham group, the FDs of the treatment groups reduced in complexity. The FD of fish injected with different strengths of acetic acid declined in a dose-dependent manner allowing us to develop an arbitrary scale of severity of the treatments. The 3D trajectory plots from some groups indicated the presence of repetitive swimming patterns akin to stereotypical movements. When administered with lidocaine, which has analgesic properties, the movement complexity of fin clipped fish reverted to a pattern that resembled that of control fish. Fractal analysis of zebrafish locomotion could potentially be adopted as a tool for fish welfare assessment.

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Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Welfare Challenges Influence the Complexity of Movement: Fractal Analysis of Behaviour in Zebrafish

Deakin

Spencer

Cossins

et al. 2019

Fishes

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“…A powerful model of collective behavior is zebrafish shoaling, a form of affiliation with conspecifics that facilitates predator avoidance, foraging and stress coping (3,18,19). Mutual 10 attraction among zebrafish develops between ten to twenty days of age when an increasing fraction of swim steering events become socially biased towards neighboring fish and animals maintain a preferred distance from one another (17,20,21).…”

Section: Main Textmentioning

confidence: 99%

Biological motion as an innate perceptual mechanism driving social affiliation

Larsch

Baier

2018

Preprint

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Collective behavior, such as shoaling in teleost fish, is driven by the perceptual recognition of conspecific animals. Because social interactions are mutual, it has been difficult to disentangle the exact sensory cues that trigger affiliation in the first place from those that are emitted by receptive and responsive shoal mates. Here we overcome this challenge in a virtual reality assay in zebrafish. We discovered that simple visual features of conspecific biological motion provide an irresistible shoaling cue. Individual juvenile fish interact with circular black dots projected onto a screen, to the same extent as they do with real conspecifics, provided these virtual objects mimic the characteristic kinetics of zebrafish swim bouts. Other naturalistic cues previously implicated in shoaling, such as fish-like shape, pigmentation pattern, or non-visual sensory modalities are not required. During growth, the animals’ stimulus preferences shift gradually, matching self-like kinetics, even in fish raised in isolation. Virtual group interactions and our multi-agent model implementation of this perceptual mechanism demonstrate sufficiency of kinetic cues to drive assortative shoaling, a phenomenon commonly observed in field studies. Coordinated behavior can emerge from autonomous interactions, such as collective odor avoidance in Drosophila, or from reciprocal interactions, such as the codified turn-taking in wren duet singing. We found that individual zebrafish shoal autonomously without evidence for a reciprocal choreography. Our results reveal individual-level, innate perceptual rules of engagement in mutual affiliation and provide experimental access to the neural mechanisms of social recognition. (239/250 words max)Significance StatementSocial affiliation is ubiquitous in the animal kingdom, but fundamental sensory cues driving group formation remain elusive. During swarm behavior, for example, individuals dynamically exchange sensory cues with their neighbors, presenting an intertwined choreography opaque to formal analysis of causal stimulus-response relationships. Using a virtual interaction assay for psychophysical analysis, we solved this issue and identify biological motion as the irresistible trigger of social affiliation in zebrafish, Danio rerio. Given that many species form groups including shoals, flocks and herds, perceptual mechanisms of social recognition and their underlying neural circuits are likely shared across vertebrates. The identification of fundamental affiliation-inducing cues is a prerequisite for relating individual-level sensory-motor transformations to collective behavior. (112/120 words max)

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“… SUMMARY Social cues of threat are widely reported [1–3], whether actively produced to trigger responses in others, such as the emission of alarm calls, or by-products of an encounter with a predator, like the defensive behaviors themselves, such as an escape flight [4–14]. Although the recognition of social alarm cues is often innate [15–17], in some instances it requires experience to trigger defensive responses [4,7].…”

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confidence: 99%

Freezing displayed by others is a learned cue of danger resulting from co-experiencing own-freezing and shock

Cruz

Heinemans

Márquez

et al. 2019

Preprint

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SUMMARYSocial cues of threat are widely reported [1–3], whether actively produced to trigger responses in others, such as the emission of alarm calls, or by-products of an encounter with a predator, like the defensive behaviors themselves, such as an escape flight [4–14]. Although the recognition of social alarm cues is often innate [15–17], in some instances it requires experience to trigger defensive responses [4,7]. One mechanism proposed for how learning from self-experience contributes to social behavior is that of auto-conditioning, whereby subjects learn to associate their own behaviors with the relevant trigger events. Through this process the same behaviors, now displayed by others, gain meaning. [18,19 but see: 20]. Although it has been shown that only animals with prior experience with shock display observational freezing [21–25] suggesting that auto-conditioning could mediate this process, evidence for this hypothesis was lacking. Previously we found that when a rat freezes, the silence that results from immobility triggers observational freezing in its cage-mate, provided the cage-mate had experienced shocks before [24]. Hence, in our study auto-conditioning would correspond to rats learning to associate shock with their own response to it – freezing. Using a combination of behavioral and optogenetic manipulations, here we show that freezing becomes an alarm cue by a direct association with shock. Our work shows that auto-conditioning can indeed modulate social interactions, expanding the repertoire of cues that mediate social information exchange, providing a framework to study how the neural circuits involved in the self-experience of defensive behaviors overlap with the ones involved in socially triggered defensive behaviors.

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Social information use in threat perception: Social buffering, contagion and facilitation of alarm responses

Cited by 27 publications

References 36 publications

Welfare Challenges Influence the Complexity of Movement: Fractal Analysis of Behaviour in Zebrafish

Welfare Challenges Influence the Complexity of Movement: Fractal Analysis of Behaviour in Zebrafish

Biological motion as an innate perceptual mechanism driving social affiliation

Freezing displayed by others is a learned cue of danger resulting from co-experiencing own-freezing and shock

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