Peer Kamil Novel Pdf Download
Lottie Dedinas
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Thank you very much for responding to the few outstanding suggestions that I, and the two reviewers, had. I am happy to accept your article for publication in PeerJ.
# PeerJ Staff Note - this decision was reviewed and approved by Jennifer Vonk, a PeerJ Section Editor covering this Section #
The authors modified the manuscript following my suggestions or they clearly explained their experimental choices.
I think the manuscript is focussed on the interesting point. I do not have other methodological concerns and the language is clear and easy to follow.
I think this interesting study can now be considered for pubblication.
- I believe that the authors have addressed my previous concerns and have improved the introduction (background/context, hypotheses, etc). I noticed just a few minor things upon review:
- Line 63: I think that the sentence "For instance, numerical abilities in fishes are often tested through shoal size discrimination as in many species, a solitary fish will naturally join the largest of two groups of conspecifics (e.g. Hager & Helfman, 1991)" may need revision.
"As in many species" stands out as odd. Perhaps add "and" before "as in many species" ? Or move "As in many species" toward front of sentence?
- Line 71: Do the authors mean "improved performance"?
"Increased performance" strikes me as meaning increased participation vs. improvement in testing/success.
Lines 129-132: I think it is good that the authors have discussed the distance needed to swim to the plates in the introduction. However, this statement still does not explain what the prediction is: I would suggest the authors consider replacing "impact" with "increase" or "improve" or "positively affect" if this is indeed their prediction (ie "This increase in distance, and hence the time required before making a choice, also has the potential to increase the accuracy of decisions...").
- I do not see the letter codes (to indicate significance) in Figure 2. Apologies if I am missing something, but I have reviewed this figure several times and I do not see the "different letters at the top" as stated in the caption...
Three experts in your field have now reviewed your article and each has provided clear and detailed feedback on your article and suggested ways in which you can enhance your article. I will not reiterate each of their points, but two common themes in their comments are the framing of the article and the interpretation of your results:
First, the reviewers note that your Introduction and Discussion fail to adequately recognize previous relevant studies in relation to comparative cognition research and the importance of experimental design. Furthermore, the examples you give are predominantly studies run with primates and studies of social cognition, neither of which pertain directly to your methodology. I agree with both of these points. I would think a broader overview of the literature could be provided if some of the current detail about previously-run primate studies is omitted from the Introduction.
Second, the reviewers also note some concerns with the methodology in terms of potential alternative cues (e.g., side of reward presentation and odor cues). You need to address these concerns in your Discussion and perhaps via your analyses too.
Given the soundness of your methodology, I believe that with changes to your framing and discussion to address the three reviewers' feedback, your article has the potential to be accepted for publication, although this of course is not guaranteed.
Although this paper is well-written, I do not think the introduction and discussion show sufficient background on this topic. The effects of the details of a task on performance are not only well-studied, but could be said to be characteristic of large swathes of comparative cognition. This is not a new insight, and I am uncomfortable with the authors presenting it as such. This isn't a matter of whether the ideas and experiment in this manuscript are sufficiently "novel" (although they are presented that way by the authors), but more that it gives a false impression about the state of the field of animal cognition.
I have a couple of examples from the introduction where the authors are present commonplace ideas in comparative psychology as either unexplored or very recent (all of which can also apply to the discussion and conclusion):
64-69: The idea that species might differ in attention/motivation and this might affect performance in tests of cognition is not new, and did not originate with Lotem & Halpern (2012). Bitterman's tests of cognition across species in the 1960's were specifically controlling for this, and Alan Kamil wrote extensively about this as a possible barrier to progress to comparative studies of cognition in the 1980s (I strongly recommend his "synthetic approach to animal intelligence" from 1987, for example). This also applied to 327-330, which reads as though this insight has come about in the last couple of years.
70-73: An enormous amount of research in comparative cognition is about how slight modifications of paradigms influence performance. This is particularly true for studies of spatial memory. See for example the comparison between pigeons tested in a regular radial maze (Bond, Cook & Lamb, 1981) and in an open field maze (Spetch & Edwards 1986). Or Michael Brown's work in the early 1990's on the effect of radial maze arm length on performance in rats. These are just some early examples, there are many more from recent years. Lots of journals publish these studies frequently (e.g. The Journal of Comparative Psychology, Comparative Cognition and Behaviour Reviews, Learning & Behaviour, the Journal of the Experimental Analysis of Behavior, Journal of Experimental Psychology: Animal Learning & Cognition). These studies are interested in what these changes tell us about the mechanisms at work, so the aims might be a little different from the comparative study of cognition which you are trying to push forwards, but they are fundamentally the same.
74-97: In this vein, I think the examples used are a little odd. Not only is there a large literature dedicated to examining the effect of these kinds of manipulations, but the examples you give are also from social cognition. I understand the point you are making with this example, but I feel an example from spatial learning would be more apt.
98: The role that ecology plays (or might play) in learning is also well studied. I can see you want to refer to work on cleaner wrasse, but Kamil & Krebs and others covered similar ground in the 80s with their studies of food-storing birds (and Kamil's later work on transitive inference). Even in hardcore associative learning, it have long been known that some things can be associated together much easier than others, in ways that make ecological sense (smell+sickness or light+shock). Again, I am not objecting to this experiment, but I would like the authors to acknowledge what has come before, to prevent it feeling like they are trying to reinvent the wheel.
330-331: It might not be the authors intention, but this sounds as though good experimetnal design is a novel concept! We have known that experimental design matters in comparative cognition for the last 100 years! This shouldn't be news to anyone in animal cognition. I also think this sentence is rather unfair to your study: you can change parts of a task and still have a good experimental design. The idea that a perfectly designed experiment will unambigously get at "cognition" is just not true. Cognition is a collection of mechanisms taking in and processing multiple types of information and then guiding a wide range of behaviours. Variation in sensory systems, species typical motivations or behaviours, as well as capacity to act in terms of morphology (hard to teach a fish to point, for example), mean that no test will ever be perfect. But how animals change their performance when you change the test can tell you something about how they solved it, the mechanisms they used, and the information they learned. By pulling that apart (using experiments like this one), we can get at the mechanisms involved and then maybe explore how the properties of these mechanisms vary across species (food storing birds is a great example here). It won't be achieved by just one test (or even a battery) though.
In addition:
I do not like the term "cognitive performance". You are not directly measuring cognition, you are measuring behaviour which could be impacted by all kinds of factors (motivation, perception, morphology) of which "cognition" is only one. Just say "performance", or preferably "performance in this task".
Change "cognition test" to "spatial discrimination test", this was not a general test of cognition, but rather a specific one.
I am not sure that you can say that spatial learning is not ecologically relevant to these fish. Space is one of the few areas which is almost always ecologically relevant to (mobile) animals. Do these fish not have any locations they return to, or avoid?
You seem to have found that your fish appear to learn some spatial information faster under certain conditions than under others. Rather than attributing this to differences in "cognitive performance", which suggests that cognition is homogenous and continuous, might I suggest thinking about how the fish might be solving the task and how this might be affected by the modifications you introduced (both in terms on mechanisms/processes such as discrimination or attention or associative learning, as well as the information they learn).
Space is not a single cue, and spatial tasks can be solved in a number of ways. Did the fish learn the location? Or did they learn a direction to swim? Or even the "geometry" of the arena? Do any of these impact how the fish respond to the changes? Does the poor performance in the reversal mean that they are preferentially using spatial information to solve the task (and so struggle when the spatial location of food changes)?
I think it would be helpful to look at some of the psychological work on this (as referred to in the section above) and see why, for example, people think that arm length affects radial maze performance. These studies would appear to be very relevant to the experiment you designed, and understanding more about why these differences might occur would be genuinely beneficial for moving the field forward. I seriously doubt there is such a thing as an "ideal" test of animal cognition which can be applied to any species and the results easily compared. If we are to make useful comparisons, it won't be based on performance in a test, we will need to understand the mechanisms and how they differ, and studies like this one are important for that. I just don't want to see it overlook all the progress others have already made on these topics in the last 50 years.