Fish and humans are alike in visual stimuli perception

Date:  February 4, 2019

Source:  American Associates, Ben-Gurion University of the Negev

Humans, fish and, most likely, other species rely on identical visual features -- color, size, orientation, and motion -- to quickly search for objects, according to researchers at Ben-Gurion University of the Negev (BGU).

The study published in the Journal of Vision involved target-training archerfish, a species with unique visual hunting skills that is widely used in experiments that evaluate visual perception. 

In their natural habitat, archerfish hunt by spitting a jet of water at insect prey on overhanging leaves to dislodge and eat them. BGU researchers trained the fish to distinguish between objects on a computer monitor above them and shoot at a desired target. By doing so, the fish were able to participate in a controlled experiment the same way humans do: simply by watching a computer screen and answering questions.

"The experiments tested archerfish performance in visual-search tasks where a target was defined by color, size, orientation, or motion," says Professor Ronen Segev, head of the BGU Neural Code Lab, and a member of the Department of Life Sciences and Zlotowski Center for Neuroscience. "We found, for the first time, that archerfish process these four features in much the same way humans identify a target amidst distracting shapes and colors."

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