Endogenous orienting in the archer fish

The literature has long emphasized the neocortex’s role in volitional processes. In this work, we examined endogenous orienting in an evolutionarily older species, the archer fish, which lacks neocortex-like cells. We used Posner’s classic endogenous cuing task, in which a centrally presented, spati...

Full description

Saved in:
Bibliographic Details
Published in:Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences - PNAS 2017-07, Vol.114 (29), p.7577-7581
Main Authors: Saban, William, Sekely, Liora, Klein, Raymond M., Gabay, Shai
Format: Article
Language:English
Subjects:
Animal cognition
Biological Sciences
Evolution
Fish
Human behavior
Neocortex
Social Sciences
Species
Citations: Items that this one cites
Items that cite this one
Online Access:Get full text
Tags: Add Tag
No Tags, Be the first to tag this record!
Description
Summary:The literature has long emphasized the neocortex’s role in volitional processes. In this work, we examined endogenous orienting in an evolutionarily older species, the archer fish, which lacks neocortex-like cells. We used Posner’s classic endogenous cuing task, in which a centrally presented, spatially informative cue is followed by a target. The fish responded to the target by shooting a stream of water at it. Interestingly, the fish demonstrated a human-like “volitional” facilitation effect: their reaction times to targets that appeared on the side indicated by the precue were faster than their reaction times to targets on the opposite side. The fish also exhibited inhibition of return, an aftermath of orienting that commonly emerges only in reflexive orienting tasks in human participants. We believe that this pattern demonstrates the acquisition of an arbitrary connection between spatial orienting and a nonspatial feature of a centrally presented stimulus in nonprimate species. In the literature on human attention, orienting in response to such contingencies has been strongly associated with volitional control. We discuss the implications of these results for the evolution of orienting, and for the study of volitional processes in all species, including humans.
ISSN:0027-8424
1091-6490
DOI:10.1073/pnas.1700574114