Deep Look's video: Don t Underestimate an Archerfish s Smarts DeepLook Shorts

Caitlin Newport, a zoologist at the University of Oxford, conducted research using the archerfish’s spitting habits as a starting point. Newport trained some lab fish to spit at an image of one human face with food rewards.Then, on a monitor suspended over the fish tank, she showed them a series of other faces, in pairs, adding in the familiar one. When the trained fish saw that familiar face, they would spit, to a high degree of accuracy. In a sense, the fish “recognized” the face. In a sense. According to Newport, however, what her experiment showed is only that an archerfish could discriminate between two human faces. Full-fledged recognition is a higher-order task and remains unproved in the fish. “To go from discrimination to recognition,” Newport explained to producer Elliott Kennerson, “you would have to show different views, or a partial view.” In other words, the fish would have to know that what it’s looking at isn’t the whole story, and be able to infer what’s missing. “That’s the next experiment,” she said. Watch the full video here 👉 https://youtu.be/gN81dtxilhE