Learning and memory in zebrafish (Danio rerio)

Learning and memory are defining features of our own species inherently important to our daily lives and to who we are. Without our memories we cease to exist as a person. Without our ability to learn individuals and collectively our society would cease to function. Diseases of the mind still remain incurable. The interest in understanding of the mechanisms of learning and memory is thus well founded. Given the complexity of such mechanisms, concerted efforts have been made to study them under controlled laboratory conditions, ie, with laboratory model organisms. The zebrafish, although new in this field, is one such model organism. The rapidly developing forward- and reverse genetic methods designed for the zebrafish and the increasing use of pharmacological tools along with numerous neurobiology techniques make this species perhaps the best model for the analysis of the mechanisms of complex central nervous system characteristics. The fact that it is an evolutionarily ancient and simpler vertebrate, but at the same time it possesses numerous conserved features across multiple levels of biological organization makes this species an excellent tool for the analysis of the mechanisms of learning and memory. The bottleneck lies in our understanding of its cognitive and mnemonic features, the topic of this chapter. The current paper builds on a chapter published in the previous edition and continues to focus on associative learning, but now it extends the discussion to other forms of learning and to recent discoveries on memory-related features and findings obtained both in adults and larval zebrafish.