Stress in the spotlight: impacts of stress on learning and memory in a cichlid fish
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Stress has been shown to both enhance and inhibit learning, which requires memory formation and memory retention. To date, the question of how stress influences learning and memory retention has been especially well studied in rodents and primates. Here, we expand our understanding of how stress influences memory formation and retention across vertebrates using the African cichlid fish, Neolamprologus pulcher. Fish were randomly assigned to either a control group or a stressed treatment group (with repeated chasing) and then trained to learn a foraging task, where they had to first learn to move a single disc off a food tray and then learned to lift a particular-coloured disc to receive the food reward. More unstressed (control) fish learned the final foraging task compared to the stressed fish although we did not detect a difference in the number of trials taken to reach the learning criteria or the number of mistakes between stressed and unstressed fish. Once the fish had learned the foraging task, we tested their memory for the task after 12, 24 and 48 days without reinforcement. We show that approximately 80% of the fish, regardless of treatment, remembered the task after 12 days, and 55% of the fish tested remembered even after 48 days. When we compared across all the memory trials, the stressed fish overall showed more memory compared to the control fish. Our results provide a memory decay curve and show that stress dampened learning while enhancing memory, thus expanding our understanding of fish cognition.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
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 | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| 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 | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| 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".