A Y-maze Choice Task Fails to Detect Alcohol Avoidance or Alcohol Preference in Zebrafish
Bibliographic record
Abstract
The zebrafish has been proposed for the analysis of the neurobiological and behavioral effects of alcohol in vertebrates. Significant behavioral changes induced by acute alcohol treatment, adaptation to chronic alcohol exposure, and withdrawal induced behavioral responses have all been shown in zebrafish. Previously, a flow-through Y-maze paradigm was proposed to directly measure alcohol preference or avoidance in zebrafish without the need to train learning-based place preference. Here, we first demonstrate that this Y-maze paradigm is capable of quantifying preference for a positive stimulus (the sight of conspecifics) and also the avoidance of a negative stimulus, a noxious olfactory cue, denatonium benzoate. Second, we test whether naïve zebrafish avoid alcohol upon first encountering this substance, and whether fish chronically exposed to alcohol show preference, or acutely alcohol treated fish show signs of intoxication leading to random choice. Our results demonstrate that acute alcohol treated fish exhibit enhanced immobility and perform at chance but chronic alcohol treated fish are not intoxicated and swim as well as naïve fish, a finding compatible with the known intoxicating effect of acute alcohol and the adaptation expected after chronic alcohol exposure. However, despite the general feasibility of the task, neither alcohol preference, nor alcohol avoidance could be detected in any of our treatment groups. We discuss the possible reasons why differential alcohol vs. freshwater choice was not found in this task and propose follow up experiments.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".