Date of Award

5-2026

Document Type

Thesis

Degree Name

Bachelor of Arts (BA)

Department

Social Sciences

First Advisor

Bauer, Gordon

Second Advisor

Levell, Samantha

Area of Concentration

Biopsychology

Abstract

It's been more than 100 years since radial mazes have been used for rodent research, and more recently, fish research. No experimentation has been done on the figure eight puffer (Dichotomytere ocellatus) in relation to the cognitive processes or maze tasks, however, there have been zebrafish, bettas, stickleback and wrasse to base research off. There have been many experiments on fish behavior regarding salinity changes, yet, none have used salinity as context towards altering cognitive abilities. The current study tested 11 figure eight puffers on their ability to solve an eight-arm radial maze in different contexts. The puffers were split into two different saline groups and swapped twice after 21 trials with the maze task. Overall, there was no significant finding in relation to the context change which could be explained by the fish species' brackish nature. However, the results did show that the puffers did learn the maze task overall and at a fast rate. In future research, this specific puffer’s cognitive abilities should be further looked into, as well as if other context changes end up having effects.

Rights

The author has granted New College of Florida the nonexclusive right to archive, make accessible, and distribute for educational purposes this work in whole or in part in all forms of media, now or hereafter known. The copyright of this work remains with the author.

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