learning and memory

[Ron Popeil]

so, for a final paper in my learning and memory psychology class, i had to write a research proposal. around fourteen pages worth of stuff: introduction, methods, discussion, etc.

so im thinking of creating a study to measure learning or memory capabilities in mantis shrimp. while other such studies to use for references or proceedural information are scant, id like to see what ideas people have in this forum for measuring intelligence or learning in mantis shrimp.

there are numerous excersizes in which a tone is sounded before food is released. or a lever is pressed in order to open food across the cage from the lever and the animal has only a short amount of time to realize this and capitalize it. hundreds of studies similar to these and much more crafty and elaborate for experimenting with animal intelligence, however mostly the subjects are rats, pigeons or chimps.

what sort of tests do you think can be created in an aquarium setting that will test mantis shrimp learning or memory abilities? using food as a reward, what sort of contraptions do you think a shrimp is capable of coming to understand? lever pushing? do you think they are capable of understanding tone cues before food is presented in different forms of classical conditioning?


any ideas anyone has would be greatly appreciated. if you know of any studies or any areas i should look into for references, please direct me as ill need all the references i can get! thank you very much!

[ShiftNation]

They say that many can see a wide range of colors and spectrums , even infrared , so you might be able to use that in some way . Certain colors for certain foods , possibly one being his favorite .

[Uriel]

They don't have ears, so tone cueing is out.

Mine definately respond to the vibrations of me thwacking the acrylic tank, however. I have taken to using three thwacks when I am going to feed them. My G. Viridis and my G. Ternatensis almost jump out of their holes/burrows when they feel that.

Dr. Roy is the obvious man to ask this question of (The no ears thing was learned from one of his assistants over on Grimreefers, unless it is Dr. Roy himself, masquerading as 'Hapalochlaena'.
-Ron

[Ron Popeil]

while they dont have ears to hear tones, im sure certain tones would produce certain vibrations they would be capable of recognizing...right? but i will definetely contact shimek...thanks for your suggestions.

please, more are welcome!

[Uriel]

Originally posted by Ron Popeil
but i will definetely contact shimek...


Dr. Ron is a great source of knowledge, but Dr. Roy (Gonodactylus on these forums) has studied Mantis for over 30 years. It was towards him that I was giving the *nod*.



-Ron (Not Dr. of anything...well, I make a damned good Cosmopolitan,actually...)

[Ron Popeil]

ah yes yes, i read that wrong. thanks for the direction!

[Jacob D]

I'm sure you'll find they do learn routine. Even my fire shrimp seem to know when it's feeding time, and I consider them pretty stupid compared to my mantis :)

My G. viridis seems to already know when my finger is in the tank it means food is soon to follow. I have been lunged at several times on dry runs (scary). Also have seen my mantis cleaning the powerhead a couple of times, very funny stuff.

It would be interesting if you can show some capacity to remember different things, I think using light would be very neat, especially if you can produce some spectrums not visible to humans (just for cool factor). Maybe use 4 different colors of light, each corresponding to feeding in a different corner of the tank. If you could get 4 identical water tight containers and place the food in only one it would be interesting to see if the mantis will learn which corner to go to for food. Just brainstorming, obviously got some details to work out.

G/L Let us know what you do!

[Ron Popeil]

mothra, excellent ideas. ill take them into consideration. thank you for your help, and ill definetly post some parts of my silly paper when im done.

[Gonodactylus]

There have been only a hand full of studies on learning and memory in stomatopods. One of the first was a paper in the 70's by one of my former students, Marjorie Reaka. She published a study on "Learning to live in holes". Justin Marshall has written a couple of papers using food reward to look at discrimination learning with respect to color and polarization. Cronin and I have a paper coming out in the fall looking at individual recognition using visual cues (habituation paradigm). It will be in the Journal of Comparative Psychology. There are also a number of papers that I did on individual recognition using odour including one in Animal Behaviour that demonstrated that mates can remember one another for a couple of weeks. I'm currently working on shape and color discrimination trying ultimately to get a concept formation in stomatopods - sort of like Pepperberg's work with Alex.

We've done some work on gonodactyloids learning to recognize prey and how to open them. As you might expect, this is fairly rapid trial and error learning.

I have also had some failures. We tried twice to look at observational learning similar to a paper published on octopus several years ago. We could not demonstrate it in stomatopods (nor in Octopus). Also, I will warn you that stomatopods do not respond to punishment very well and positive reinforment such as food often leads to autoshaping that can bring your design to a screaching halt. Finally, because stomatopods molt frequently, many long-term learning designs have problems because retention across the molt is not very good. Also, because stomatopods are so thigmotactic, spatial learning studies are difficult.

As for ideas, shape recognition relating to selecting objects in burrow construction or door closure shows some promise -square peg in a round hole?

As for sound, I would not say that all stomatopod lack hearing. Certainly they pick up substrate vibrations and two species are known to produce low frequency sounds that appear to be used in courtship and pair maintenance. We are currently looking for the "ear" in these species and I think we have found it..

Roy

[Ron Popeil]

dr. roy,

this may seem like an irrelevant topic of study, but has any work been done with latent learning in stomatopods? or other similar work done with rats that may be tried out on mantis shrimp?

this may seem sophomoric, but fortunately for my time constraints the paper im working on doesnt need to be highly necessary to science, im not exactly writing my graduate thesis on this. but your thoughts or ideas on this would be appreciated. the above post you wrote was extremely helpful.

thank you.

[Gonodactylus]

Nothing on latent learning specifically that I can think of. The Learning to LIve in Holes study comes close. I seem to remember that Brian Hazlett did some work on crabs that might apply, but I have no idea on the reference - sometime in in the late 70's or early 80's.

Roy