Layla A. Kutty*, Don H. Le*, Matthew T. Lee, Karleen Wu, Kelly J. Wallace, Dr. Hans Hofmann
Are there sex differences in our ability to discriminate color? How does this affect our daily lives and decision making as social creatures? Phenotypic and sex differences have been used to better understand specific behaviors such as aggression, submissiveness, and social learning across various model organisms. While many of the social aspects of learning and its relationship with hormone signaling have been documented, little is known about the role of color discrimination in social contexts. By altering the naturalistic communities of the highly visual cichlid fish Astatotilapia burtoni, a model system in social neuroscience, sex differences in cichlid fish learning and color discrimination are tested. The experimental design is unique in that it takes advantage of the natural dynamic social communities of these fish, rather than using a typical Pavlovian conditioning paradigm. It’s expected that males and females may learn to discriminate color differently depending on their role in the social community. In the experiment, male and female fish were placed in an aquarium lined with a specific color to become familiar with. After an acclimation week in their new communities and tank color, each fish underwent a color discrimination task. This task involved placing the fish in isolated aquaria that contained two colors, a novel color and a familiar color from their community. The total time the fish spent with the familiar color, novel color, or the colorless neutral zone was then recorded. Immediately after this task, waterborne hormone samples were collected to estimate circulating levels of the stress hormone cortisol to correlate hormone differences between male and females and analyze if the results compare with the task performance. In sum, this experimental design allows us to investigate the biological differences that affect the decision making of A. burtoni in a complex and dynamic social community.
Comments
A unique topic and interesting way to learn about the color discrimination. Highly impressed on the statistical data you presented. —Michael Eze
Very interesting topic, as well as poster design. Your figures very clearly convey your data (and the fish illustrations are nice too!). —Rob Reichle