The number, duration and depth of social relationships that an individual maintains can impact social cognition, but the connection between sociality and other aspects of cognition has hardly been explored. To date, the link between social living and intelligence has been mainly supported by studies on primates, and far fewer tests connecting sociality to cognitive abilities have used other taxa. Here, we present the first comparative study in fishes that examines whether complex social living is associated with better performance on a cognitively demanding spatial task. Using three cooperative, group-living cichlid fish species and three of their non-cooperative, more solitary close relatives, we studied maze learning and employed a new statistical extension for the ‘lme4’ and ‘glmmTMB’ packages in R that allows phylogeny to be included as a random effect term. Across trials, the three cooperative and the three non-cooperative species completed the maze faster, made fewer mistakes, and improved their inhibitory control. Although fish improved their performance, we did not detect any differences in the extent of improvement between cooperative and non-cooperative species. Both the cooperative species and the non-cooperative species took similar amounts of time to complete the maze, had comparable numbers of mistakes, and exhibited similar inhibitory control while in the maze. Our results suggest that living and breeding in complex social groups does not necessarily imply enhancement of other forms of cognition nor, more specifically, an enhanced spatial learning capacity.

个体所维持的社会关系的数量、持续时间和深度会影响社会认知，但社会性与认知其他方面之间的联系却很少被探索。迄今为止，社会生活和智力之间的联系主要得到了灵长类动物研究的支持，而将社会性与认知能力联系起来的测试使用其他分类群的情况要少得多。在这里，我们在鱼类中进行了第一次比较研究，该研究检查了复杂的社会生活是否与在认知要求高的空间任务上的更好表现有关。使用三个合作的、群居的慈鲷鱼种和三个不合作的、更孤独的近亲，我们研究了迷宫学习，并为 R 中的“lme4”和“glmmTMB”包采用了新的统计扩展，允许将系统发育作为随机效应项包括在内。在整个试验中，三个合作物种和三个非合作物种更快地完成了迷宫，犯了更少的错误，并提高了它们的抑制控制。虽然鱼提高了它们的性能，但我们没有发现合作物种和非合作物种之间的改进程度有任何差异。合作物种和非合作物种完成迷宫所需的时间相似，错误数量相当，并且在迷宫中表现出相似的抑制控制。我们的结果表明，在复杂的社会群体中生活和繁殖并不一定意味着其他形式的认知能力的增强，更具体地说，