During navigation, disoriented animals learn to use the spatial geometry of rectangular environments to gain rewards. The length of macroscopic surfaces (metric: short/long) and their spatial arrangement (sense: left/right) are powerful cues that animals prove to encode for reorientation. The aim of this study was to investigate if zebrafish (Danio rerio) could take advantage of such geometric properties in a rewarded exit task, by applying a reference memory procedure. The experiment was performed in a rectangular arena having four white walls, where fish were required to choose the two geometrically equivalent exit corners lying on the reinforced diagonal. Results showed that zebrafish encoded the geometry of the arena during reorientation, solving the spatial task within the first 5 days of training. With the aim to avoid the possible influence of extravisual cues on the zebrafish success, we performed a geometric test in extinction of response after the learning day. At test, fish persisted in choosing the two correct corners, thus confirming that the navigation strategy used at training was based on geometric cues. This study adds evidence about the role of geometric frameworks in fish species, and it further validates an effective spatial learning paradigm for zebrafish.

中文翻译：

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斑马鱼（Danio rerio）在空间学习中的环境几何学。

在航行期间，迷失方向的动物学会使用矩形环境的空间几何来获得奖励。宏观表面的长度（度量：短/长）及其空间排列（感觉：左/右）是动物被证明可以重新定向的有力线索。这项研究的目的是调查斑马鱼（Danio rerio）可以通过应用参考存储过程在奖励退出任务中利用此类几何属性。实验是在具有四个白墙的矩形竞技场中进行的，需要鱼选择位于加固对角线上的两个几何等效的出口角。结果表明，斑马鱼在重新定向过程中编码了竞技场的几何形状，在训练的前5天内解决了空间任务。为了避免视觉暗示对斑马鱼成功的可能影响，我们在学习一天后进行了几何测试以消除反应。在测试中，鱼坚持选择两个正确的角，从而确认训练中使用的导航策略是基于几何线索的。