Data for: Fish can infer relations between colour cues in a non-social learning task

Transitive inference (TI) describes the ability to infer relationships between stimuli that have never been seen together before. Social cichlids can use TI in a social setting where observers assess dominance status after witnessing contests between different dyads of conspecifics. If cognitive processes are domain-general, animals should use abilities evolved in a social context also in a non-social context. Therefore, if TI is domain-general in fish, social fish should be able to use TI also in non-social tasks. Here we tested whether the cooperatively-breeding cichlid Neolamprologus pulcher can infer transitive relationships between artificial stimuli in a non-social context. We used an associative learning paradigm where the fish received a food reward when correctly solving a colour discrimination task. Eleven of twelve subjects chose the predicted outcome for TI in the first test trial and five subjects performed with 100% accuracy in six successive test trials. We found no evidence that the fish solved the TI task by value transfer. Our findings show that fish use TI also in non-social tasks with artificial stimuli, thus generalizing past results reported in a social context and hinting toward a domain-general cognitive mechanism.传递性推理（Transitive inference, TI）指个体能够推断此前未曾同时接触过的刺激之间的关联关系。社会性丽鱼可在社会场景中运用传递性推理：观察者在目睹不同同种个体配对的争斗行为后，能够借此评估种群内的社会等级地位。若认知过程属于领域一般性，则动物在社会情境中演化出的能力，同样可应用于非社会情境中。因此，若传递性推理在鱼类中为领域一般性认知能力，那么社会性鱼类应当也能在非社会任务中运用该推理能力。本研究以合作繁殖的淡水丽鱼（Neolamprologus pulcher）为受试对象，测试其能否在非社会情境中推断人工刺激间的传递性关系。我们采用关联学习范式：当鱼类正确完成颜色辨别任务时，即可获得食物奖励。12尾受试个体中有11尾在首次测试中选择了传递性推理的预期结果，另有5尾在连续6次测试中均达到100%的正确率。本研究未发现鱼类通过价值传递完成传递性推理任务的证据。本研究结果表明，鱼类同样能够在人工刺激的非社会任务中运用传递性推理，这拓展了此前仅在社会情境中报道的相关研究结论，并暗示传递性推理可能属于领域一般性的认知机制。