The video shows experiments described in the lab of Prof Vallortigara and reported in Messina et al . On the left side an example is shown of the procedure of habituation of a zebrafish to a certain numerosity; on the right side one can notice that during the dishabituation test when the numerosity is abruptly changed the zebrafish exhibit increased stay close to the stimulus to explore the novelty.
Many investigations have also used behavior to try to understand how fish gauge quantity, but Vallortigara's team found that this required looking more closely at the cellular and genetic level. To answer these questions, researchers have used"Another open issue is whether numerical quantities are really computed as an abstract property or whether animals always think about numbers on the basis of other cues from their surroundings ," said Vallortigara.
"A big ongoing question is whether the mechanisms for quantity cognition in the different parts of the animal kingdom evolved from a or separately as a result of convergent evolution under similar selective pressures," added Vallortigara., model systems like zebrafish are surprisingly close to humans and many researchers have been using zebrafish to better understand learning disabilities in humans.
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