PERFORMANCE OF GOLDFISH TRAINED IN ALLOCENTRIC AND EGOCENTRIC MAZE PROCEDURES SUGGESTS THE PRESENCE OF A COGNITIVE MAPPING SYSTEM IN FISHES

Goldfish were trained to obtain food in a four-arm maze placed in a ro om with relevant spatial cues. Four experimental conditions were run: allocentric, egocentric, egocentric + allocentric, and control. Relati ve to controls, all groups were able to solve the differ ent tasks wit h high accuracy after 1 week of training. Subsequent transfer tests re vealed place and response strategies for allocentric and egocentric gr oups, respectively, and both types of strategies for the ego-allocentr ic group. Moreover, the allocentric group showed the capacity to choos e the appropriate trajectory toward the goal, even from novel starting points, presumably by using the distal cues as a whole. The results s uggest that, in addition to using egocentric strategies, goldfish are able to solve spatial tasks on the basis of allocentric frames of refe rence and to build complex spatial cognitive representations of their environment.