Visual discrimination and amodal completion in zebrafish

While zebrafish represent an important model for the study of the visual system, visual perception in this species is still less investigated than in other teleost fish. In this work, we validated for zebrafish two versions of a visual discrimination learning task, which is based on the motivation to reach food and companions. Using this task, we investigated zebrafish ability to discriminate between two different shape pairs (i.e., disk vs. cross and full vs. amputated disk). Once zebrafish were successfully trained to discriminate a full from an amputated disk, we also tested their ability to visually complete partially occluded objects (amodal completion). After training, animals were presented with two amputated disks. In these test stimuli, another shape was either exactly juxtaposed or only placed close to the missing sectors of the disk. Only the former stimulus should elicit amodal completion. In human observers, this stimulus causes the impression that the other shape is occluding the missing sector of the disk, which is thus perceived as a complete, although partially hidden, disk. In line with our predictions, fish reinforced on the full disk chose the stimulus eliciting amodal completion, while fish reinforced on the amputated disk chose the other stimulus. This represents the first demonstration of amodal completion perception in zebrafish. Moreover, our results also indicated that a specific shape pair (disk vs. cross) might be particularly difficult to discriminate for this species, confirming previous reports obtained with different procedures.