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

Abstract

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. Toward fine control of experimental variables and high consistency across trials, we developed a novel robotics-based experimental test paradigm, in which a robotic replica demonstrated to live subjects the correct door to join a group of conspecifics. We performed two experimental conditions. In the individual training condition, subjects learned the correct door without the replica. In the social training condition, subjects observed the replica approaching both the incorrect door, to no effect, and the correct door, which would open after spending enough time close to it. During these observations, subjects could not actively follow the replica. Zebrafish increased their preference for the correct door over the course of 20 training sessions, but we failed to identify evidence of social learning, whereby we did not register significant differences in performance between the individual and social training conditions. These results suggest that zebrafish may not be able to learn a route by observation, although more research comparing robots to live demonstrators is needed to substantiate this claim.

Opposite valence social information provided by bio-robotic demonstrators shapes selection processes in the green bottle fly

“…[9,12,54]. The animal-robot interaction experimental paradigm, located at the interface of animal behaviour and robotics, is providing an encouraging avenue to unveil social learning in vertebrates [44,55].…”

Social Integrating Robots Suggest Mitigation Strategies for Ecosystem Decay

“…The way of locomotion does not necessarily have to be identical to the locomotion of the organisms, as long as it does not disturb them in any way. Various approaches along these lines have been performed with fish robots, either with magnetic coupling or mounted on a rod ( Faria et al, 2010 ; Donati et al, 2016 ; Landgraf et al, 2016 ; Bonnet et al, 2017b ; Worm et al, 2017 ; Porfiri et al, 2019 ; Romano et al, 2019 ; Utter and Brown, 2020 ), with wheeled robots interacting with cockroach communities ( Halloy et al, 2007 ) or flocks of ducks ( Vaughan et al, 2000 ) and with a dancing robot with honeybee foragers ( Landgraf et al, 2010 ). In all these cases, the locomotion of the robot was achieved differently from the locomotion of the living animal counterparts, and the robots were of varying bio-mimetic perfection, some just emitting the key stimuli necessary for influencing the organisms ( Tinbergen, 1951 ).…”

Behavioural and life-history responses of mosquitofish to biologically inspired and interactive robotic predators

“…Further details on the robotic platform are in the electronic supplementary material. The platform was originally designed in [53] to study zebrafish social behaviour and used in [54] to examine zebrafish learning.…”