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Zebrafish exhibit associative learning for an aversive robotic stimulus

Abstract

Zebrafish have quickly emerged as a species of choice in preclinical research, holding promise to advance the field of behavioral pharmacology through high-throughput experiments. Besides biological and heuristic considerations, zebrafish also constitute a fundamental tool that fosters the replacement of mammals with less sentient experimental subjects. Notwithstanding these features, experimental paradigms to investigate emotional and cognitive domains in zebrafish are still limited. Studies on emotional memories have provided sound methodologies to investigate fear conditioning in zebrafish, but these protocols may still benefit from a reconsideration of the independent variables adopted to elicit aversion. Here, we designed a fear-conditioning paradigm in which wild-type zebrafish were familiarized over six training sessions with an empty compartment and a fear-eliciting one. The fearful stimulus was represented by three zebrafish replicas exhibiting a fully synchronized and polarized motion as they were maneuvered along 3D trajectories by a robotic platform. When allowed to freely swim between the two compartments in the absence of the robotic stimulus (test session), zebrafish displayed a marked avoidance of the stimulus-paired one. To investigate whether fear conditioning was modulated by psychoactive compounds, two groups of zebrafish were administered ethanol (0.25% and 1.00%, ethanol/water, by volume) a few minutes before the test session. We observed that ethanol administration abolished the conditioned avoidance of the stimulus-paired compartment. Ultimately, this study confirms that robotic stimuli may be used in the design of fear-conditioning paradigms, which are sensitive to pharmacological manipulations.

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Fig. 1: Robotics-based experimental setup.
Fig. 2: Workflow of the tracking algorithm to obtain the trajectory of the fish from the experimental videos.
Fig. 3: Experimental results.

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Data availability

Datasets and codes used in the analyses are stored at the authors’ home institution and will be provided upon request.

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Acknowledgements

The authors are grateful to Vrishin Rajiv Soman for his help in experiments and data collection and to Andrea Scaramuzzi for technical assistance. This work was supported by the National Institutes of Health, National Institute on Drug Abuse under grant number 1R21DA042558-01A1 and the Office of Behavioral and Social Sciences Research that co-funded the National Institute on Drug Abuse grant.

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Contributions

S.M. and M.P. designed and supervised the research. C.S. and M.K. performed the experiments and prepared a first draft of methods. M.K. developed the tracking software for the analysis and generated the datasets. S.M. provided a first draft of the manuscript. All the authors reviewed and approved the manuscript.

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Correspondence to Maurizio Porfiri.

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The authors declare no competing interests.

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Supplementary information

Supplementary information

Supplementary Figures 1–3

Reporting Summary

Supplementary Software

Supplementary Data

Trajectory of the shoal of replicas used to control the robotic platform during the experiments

Supplementary Video

Sample tracking video of a fish from the top and front views overlaid with instantaneous speed, acceleration and angular speed. The green cross shows the position of the fish detected by the tracking software.

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Macrì, S., Karakaya, M., Spinello, C. et al. Zebrafish exhibit associative learning for an aversive robotic stimulus. Lab Anim 49, 259–264 (2020). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41684-020-0599-9

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