Abstract
In the first part of this paper, some laboratory experiments on discriminative learning in fishes are reviewed-experiments on the discrimination of food signals, reward and nonreward, temporal context, compound stimuli, and the components of compound stimuli. The results, which closely resemble those obtained with birds and mammals in analogous experiments and point to the operation of common vertebrate mechanisms, should be of interest to students of migration in fishes who are concerned with the role of discriminative learning in migratory behavior. Comparative experiments on partial reinforcement, on successive acquisition and extinction, and on incentive contrast are reviewed in the second part of this paper. The results suggest that there has been some evolutionary divergence in vertebrate learning and that generalizations to fishes from work with birds and mammals (about whose learning a great deal is known) should be made with care.
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Bitterman, M.E. (1984). Migration and Learning in Fishes. In: McCleave, J.D., Arnold, G.P., Dodson, J.J., Neill, W.H. (eds) Mechanisms of Migration in Fishes. NATO Conference Series, vol 14. Springer, Boston, MA. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4613-2763-9_25
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4613-2763-9_25
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