Thursday June 4, 2026
EurekAlert! —
“Our results suggest that it is not enough to simply see social cues. The interaction itself, the fact that another individual responds to you in real time, appears to be important for normal brain development,” says Olivia Carmstedt, first author of the study, who carried out the project as part of her master’s thesis.
The research group at the Department of Zoology, Stockholm University, investigated how different types of social experience affect brain development in young guppies. Over a period of 20 days, the fish were raised under one of three conditions: with visual contact with live fish, with video recordings of fish on a screen, or with very limited social contact.
The fishes who had contact with live fish developed brains that were almost six percent larger than those of fish who only saw other fish on a screen. They also had relatively larger olfactory bulbs, a brain region important for instance in social information processing. The brains of fish who had only seen other fish on a screen were more similar to the brains of fish with minimal social exposure than to those of fish who had experienced live social contact.