Social context shapes cognitive abilities: associative memories are modulated by fight outcome and social isolation in the crab Neohelice granulata

Abstract

Cognitive abilities of an animal can be influenced by distinct social experiences. However, the extent of this modulation has not been addressed in different learning scenarios: are all tasks similarly affected by social experiences? In the present study, we analyzed the effect of social dominance in aversive and appetitive memory processes in the crab Neohelice granulata . In addition, we studied the influence of social isolation on memory ability. Social dominance experiments consisted of an agonistic phase immediately followed by a memory phase. During the agonistic phase, matched pairs of male crabs were staged in 10-min encounters and the dominant or subordinate condition of each member of the dyad was determined. During the memory phase, crabs were trained to acquire aversive or appetitive memory and tested 24 h later. Results showed that the agonistic encounter can modulate long-term memory according to the dominance condition in such a way that memory retention of subordinates results higher than their respective dominant. Remarkably, this result was found for both aversive and appetitive memory tasks. In addition, we found that isolated animals showed no memory retention when compared with animals that remained grouped. Altogether this work emphasizes the importance of social context as a modulator of cognitive abilities. Supplementary Information The online version contains supplementary material available at 10.1007/s10071-021-01492-6.

Deprivation of direct adult contact during development affects social representation in a songbird

“…It was already known that the presence of adults during development is important for social functioning such as the regulation of aggression and appropriate dominance hierarchy structuring (Slotow et al, 2000;Bourjade et al, 2008Bourjade et al, , 2009Perré et al, 2002). A recent study on a crab species (Neohelice granulata) demonstrated that social isolation has a negative effect on longterm memory retention of both aversive or appetitive tasks (Santos et al, 2021). However, here we show that even the social motivation for conspecific cues can be affected, although the birds had been raised in a group and were isolated at the time of testing.…”

Social isolation affects intra‐specific interaction behaviour and reduces the size of the cerebellar brain region in juvenile Atlantic salmon Salmo salar

“…Belonging to a social group may also have beneficial effects on cognitive performance, as shown in wild as well as captive‐reared birds (Ashton et al ., 2018; Langley et al ., 2018), crabs (Santos et al . 2021) and fish (Brandão et al ., 2015; Ausas et al . 2019), but effects are not ubiquitous in the animal kingdom ( e.g ., Riley et al .…”