ArticleProceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America2016
Cross-modal object recognition and dynamic weighting of sensory inputs in a fish.
Article in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America, 2016. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 16 papers.
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16 citing papers in PubMed, 53 citations in OpenAlex.
- The visual challenges of short-range navigation in teleost fish.The Journal of experimental biology · 2026Review
- Crossmodal Correspondence Mediates Crossmodal Transfer from Visual to Auditory Stimuli in Category Learning.Journal of Intelligence · 2024Article
- Daubenton's bats maintain stereotypical echolocation behaviour and a lombard response during target interception in light.BMC zoology · 2024Article
- First-sight recognition of touched objects shows that chicks can solve Molyneux's problem.Biology letters · 2024Article
- A perspective on neuroethology: what the past teaches us about the future of neuroethology.Journal of comparative physiology. A, Neuroethology, sensory, neural, and behavioral physiology · 2024Review
- Weakly electric fish use self-generated motion to discriminate object shape.Animal behaviour · 2023Article
- Mormyrid fish as models for investigating sensory-motor integration: A behavioural perspective.Journal of zoology (London, England : 1987) · 2023Review
- Cross-modal perception of identity by sound and taste in bottlenose dolphins.Science advances · 2022Article
- Five Breakthroughs: A First Approximation of Brain Evolution From Early Bilaterians to Humans.Frontiers in neuroanatomy · 2021Article
- Assessment of fighting ability in the vocal cichlidBiology open · 2019Article
- Integrating vision and echolocation for navigation and perception in bats.Science advances · 2019Article
- Electric pulse characteristics can enable species recognition in African weakly electric fish species.Scientific reports · 2018Article
- The Mormyrid Optic Tectum Is a Topographic Interface for Active Electrolocation and Visual Sensing.Frontiers in neuroanatomy · 2018Article
- Computational principles and models of multisensory integration.Current opinion in neurobiology · 2017Review
- Electrosensory capture during multisensory discrimination of nearby objects in the weakly electric fish Gnathonemus petersii.Scientific reports · 2017Article
- The Transition to Minimal Consciousness through the Evolution of Associative Learning.Frontiers in psychology · 2016Article
Corrections and comments
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Authors and funding
4 authors at 2 institutions in 2 countries.
Funding
No grant is acknowledged in the PubMed record.
Abstract
Most animals use multiple sensory modalities to obtain information about objects in their environment. There is a clear adaptive advantage to being able to recognize objects cross-modally and spontaneously (without prior training with the sense being tested) as this increases the flexibility of a multisensory system, allowing an animal to perceive its world more accurately and react to environmental changes more rapidly. So far, spontaneous cross-modal object recognition has only been shown in a few mammalian species, raising the question as to whether such a high-level function may be associated with complex mammalian brain structures, and therefore absent in animals lacking a cerebral cortex. Here we use an object-discrimination paradigm based on operant conditioning to show, for the first time to our knowledge, that a nonmammalian vertebrate, the weakly electric fish Gnathonemus petersii, is capable of performing spontaneous cross-modal object recognition and that the sensory inputs are weighted dynamically during this task. We found that fish trained to discriminate between two objects with either vision or the active electric sense, were subsequently able to accomplish the task using only the untrained sense. Furthermore we show that cross-modal object recognition is influenced by a dynamic weighting of the sensory inputs. The fish weight object-related sensory inputs according to their reliability, to minimize uncertainty and to enable an optimal integration of the senses. Our results show that spontaneous cross-modal object recognition and dynamic weighting of sensory inputs are present in a nonmammalian vertebrate.
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