Spatial Learning and Its Neural Basis in Fish

Fishes show impressive abilities for spatial orientation and navigation that parallel those described in land vertebrates. The spatial behavior of fishes is a complex, flexible, and adaptive process that involves a variety of cognitive phenomena and diverse learning and memory mechanisms. Fish can use multiple sources of spatial information from different sensory modalities and rely on a variety of spatial strategies and multiple, separate spatial learning and memory systems that depend on a variety of neural substrates. Like mammals and birds, teleost fish seem to be able to use egocentric strategies based on the function of the brainstem, cerebellum, or optic tectum. In addition, like mammals and birds, fish seem to be able to use allocentric strategies based on maplike spatial memory representations that depend on telencephalic structures and especially on the hippocampal pallium. The close functional similarity between the spatial cognition mechanisms and their neural basis in teleost fish and land vertebrates suggests that the evolution of these cognitive capabilities may be a conserved trait in vertebrate evolution.