Link to bioRxiv paper: http://biorxiv.org/cgi/content/short/2020.08.03.234658v1?rss=1 Authors: Wallace, K. J., Hofmann, H. A. Abstract: Sex differences in behavior and cognition can be driven by differential selection pressures from the environment and in the underlying neuromolecular mechanisms of decision-making. The highly social cichlid fish Astatotilapia burtoni exhibits dynamic and complex social hierarchies, yet explicit cognitive testing (outside of social contexts) and investigations of sex differences in cognition have yet to be fully explored. Here we assessed male and female A. burtoni in two cognitive tasks: a novel object recognition task and a spatial task. We hypothesized that given both males and females navigate dynamic social environments, we would observe less pronounced sex differences in cognition relative to other species with more 'static' sex differences. In the present study we find that both sexes prefer the familiar object in a novel object recognition task, but the time at which they exhibit this preference differs between the sexes. Females more frequently learned a spatial task, exhibiting longer decision latencies and quicker error correction, suggesting a potential speed-accuracy tradeoff. Furthermore, the sexes differ in space use in both tasks and in a principal component analysis of the spatial task. A model selection analysis finds that preference, approach, and interaction duration in the novel object recognition task that reach a threshold of importance averaged across all models. This work highlights the need to explicitly test for sex differences in cognition to better understand how individuals navigate dynamic social environments. Copy rights belong to original authors. Visit the link for more info