Abstract
The zebrafish (Danio rerio) is gaining popularity as a laboratory organism and is used to model many human diseases. Many behavioural measures of locomotion and cognition have been developed that involve the processing of visual stimuli. However, the innate preference for vertical and horizontal stripes in zebrafish is unknown. We tested the preference of adult zebrafish for three achromatic patterns (vertical stripes, horizontal stripes, and squares) at three different size conditions (1, 5, and 10 mm). Each animal was tested once in a rectangular arena, which had a different pattern of the same size condition on the walls of either half of the arena. We show that zebrafish have differential preferences for patterned stimuli at each of the three size conditions. These results suggest that zebrafish have naïve preferences that should be carefully considered when testing zebrafish in paradigms using visual stimuli.
Highlights
The zebrafish (Danio rerio) has emerged as a popular model organism in biomedical research and is regularly used to investigate the causes and treatments of a range of human disorders (Kalueff, Stewart & Gerlai, 2014)
There are a variety of existing behavioural tests in adult zebrafish including the T-maze, plus maze, spatial alternation task, light/dark test, novel object recognition test, episodic-like memory test, How to cite this article Rimstad et al (2017), Preferences for achromatic horizontal, vertical, and square patterns in zebrafish (Danio rerio)
We analyzed the data for effects of stimulus combination within each of the three size conditions by analyzing the amount of time spent in the portion of the arena lined with that particular pattern, as well as velocity of the fish
Summary
The zebrafish (Danio rerio) has emerged as a popular model organism in biomedical research and is regularly used to investigate the causes and treatments of a range of human disorders (Kalueff, Stewart & Gerlai, 2014). Some of these paradigms may require the fish to associate coloured stimuli (blue, red, green, or purple) with food rewards (Williams, White & Messer, 2002; Colwill et al, 2005). These studies reflect the complexity of zebrafish colour preferences and the fact that an understanding of these preferences is necessary prior to the use of behavioural paradigms involving coloured stimuli
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