Abstract
Sex differences in behavior and cognition can be driven by differential selection pressures from the environment and in the underlying neuromolecular mechanisms of decision-making. The highly social cichlid fish Astatotilapia burtoni exhibits dynamic and complex social hierarchies, yet explicit cognitive testing (outside of social contexts) and investigations of sex differences in cognition have yet to be fully explored. Here we assessed male and female A. burtoni in two cognitive tasks: a novel object recognition task and a spatial task. We hypothesized that males outperform females in a spatial learning task and exhibit more neophilic/exploratory behavior across both tasks. In the present study we find that both sexes prefer the familiar object in a novel object recognition task, but the time at which they exhibit this preference differs between the sexes. Females more frequently learned the spatial task, exhibiting longer decision latencies and quicker error correction, suggesting a potential speed-accuracy tradeoff. Furthermore, the sexes differ in space use in both tasks and in a principal component analysis of the spatial task. A model selection analysis finds that preference, approach, and interaction duration in the novel object recognition task reach a threshold of importance averaged across all models. This work highlights the need to explicitly test for sex differences in cognition to better understand how individuals navigate dynamic social environments.
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Data accessibility
Raw data (Microsoft excel) as well as analysis and visualization R code can be found at https://github.com/kellyjwallace/Wallace_Hofmann_2020_sex_differences, via the Texas Data Repository (https://data.tdl.org/), or via request to the corresponding author.
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Acknowledgements
The authors would like to thank Kavyaa Choudhary, Layla Kutty, Don Le, Matthew Lee, and Karleen Wu for assistance in data collection, and to Mike Ryan, Tessa Solomon-Lane, Felicity Muth, and all members of the Hofmann Lab for discussion and assistance.
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This work was supported by the National Science Foundation (NSF) Bio/computational Evolution in Action Consortium (BEACON) Center for the Study of Evolution in Action and an NSF Grant IOS1354942 (to HAH), a Ford Foundation Predoctoral Fellowship (National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine), a UT Austin Graduate School Continuing Fellowship, The Zoology Scholarship Endowment for Excellence (Graduate School at the University of Texas at UT Austin), and a Department of Integrative Biology Doctoral Dissertation Improvement grant (to KJW).
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HAH and KJW conceived of the study. KJW designed and constructed the experimental apparatus and data collection procedures, collected behavioral data, and performed statistical analyses. HAH and KJW interpreted the results. KJW wrote the initial draft of the manuscript, and HAH provided feedback and comments during manuscript writing. All authors give final approval for publication.
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Wallace, K.J., Hofmann, H.A. Equal performance but distinct behaviors: sex differences in a novel object recognition task and spatial maze in a highly social cichlid fish. Anim Cogn 24, 1057–1073 (2021). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10071-021-01498-0
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10071-021-01498-0