A new study from MIT and Harvard University suggests that the brains of the seemingly simple zebrafish are more sophisticated than previously thought. The researchers found that larval zebrafish can use visual information to create three-dimensional maps of their physical surroundings. Photo Credit: Petr Kuznetsov |
A new study from MIT and Harvard University suggests that the brains of the seemingly simple zebrafish are more sophisticated than previously thought. The researchers found that larval zebrafish can use visual information to create three-dimensional maps of their physical surroundings — a feat that scientists didn’t think was possible.
In the new study, the researchers discovered that zebrafish can move around environmental barriers while escaping predators. The findings suggest that zebrafish are “much smarter than we thought,” and could be used as a model to explore many aspects of human visual perception, the researchers say.
“These results show you can study one of the most fundamental computational problems faced by animals, which is perceiving a 3D model of the environment, in larval zebrafish,” says Vikash Mansinghka, a principal research scientist in MIT’s Department of Brain and Cognitive Sciences and an author of the new study.
Andrew Bolton, an MIT research scientist and a research associate at Harvard University, is the senior author of the new study, which appears in the journal Current Biology. Hanna Zwaka, a Harvard postdoc, and Olivia McGinnis, a recent Harvard graduate who is now a graduate student at the Oxford University, are the paper’s lead authors.