Perception of the Muller-Lyer illusion in guppies  

作　　者：Maria SANTACA Christian AGRILLO 

机构地区：[1]Department of General Psychology,University of Padova,Via Venezia 8,Padova 35131,Italy

出　　处：《Current Zoology》2020年第2期205-213,共9页动物学报（英文版）

基　　金：This study was supported by a“STARS@unipd”(ANIM_ILLUS)awarded to Christian Agrillo.

摘　　要：The Muller-Lyer illusion is a well-known distortion illusion that occurs when the spatial arrangement of inducers(i.e.,inwards-or outwards-pointing arrowheads)influences a line's perceived relative length.To date,this illusion has been reported in several animal species but only in 1 teleost fish(i.e.,redtail splitfins Xenotoca eiseni),although teleost fish represent approximately 50%of vertebrate diversity.We investigated the perception of this illusion in another teleost fish:guppies Poecilia reticulata,a species that diverged from the redtail splitfin 65 million years ago.The guppies were trained to select the longer between 2 lines;after meeting the learning criterion,illusory trials were presented.Control trials were also arranged to exclude the possibility that their choices were based on potential spatial biases that relate to the illusory pattern.The guppies'overall performance indicated that they were susceptible to the Muller-Lyer illusion,perceiving the line with the inwards-pointing arrowheads as longer.The performance in the control trials excluded the possibility that the subjects used the physical differences between the 2 figures as the discriminative cue in the illusory trials.Our study suggests that sensibility to the Muller-Lyer illusion could be widespread across teleost fish and reinforces the idea that the perceptual mechanisms underlying size estimation might be similar across vertebrates.

关 键 词：comparative PERCEPTION Muller-Lyer ILLUSION POECILIA reticulata visual ILLUSIONS 

分 类 号：Q95[生物学—动物学]