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LoginGoldfish 3second memory myth busted by 15year old student
22 posts
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It is a common belief that goldfishes are only capable of having
short term memory and cannot remember things that happened just more than three seconds earlier.
However, this idea has been proven wrong by an Australian 15-year old student. The said student is Rory Stokes of the Australian Science and Mathematics School in Adelaide.
His experiment involved teaching goldfish to swim to a beacon by making a connection to the beacon itself and food. He sprinkled food at the beacon every feeding time for a period of three weeks.
He then removed the beacon for a period of six days. After that, Stokes placed back the beacon and amazingly, the goldfish swam to it just after 4.4 seconds.
"I wanted to challenge this theory as I believe it is a myth intended to make us feel less guilty about keeping fish in small tank. My results strongly showed that goldfish can retain knowledge for at least six days," commented Stokes.
Aside from the above mentioned experiment, Rory Stokes also conducted several maze experiments to check if goldfish are capable of solving such in search for food. The brilliant student added:My experiments showed that goldfish have the mental capabilities to learn and remember fairly complex concepts and they can retain that knowledge for at least a number of days.
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Hmm.. I'm thinking when he first placed his beacon down, did the goldfish actually swam to it thinking it is a food. So after carrying out his experiment and placing the beacon down the second time, he thought he trained the goldfish thinking that it contains food, when in fact, the goldfish thought that it is a food every time he placed the beacon down.
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Isn't it a typical reaction for fishes to swim to their food? unless the fishes have a stomachache, i haven't seen any fishes not responding to food. Though the goldfish swims to the beacon which did not contain food but still it doesn't prove that goldfish "remembers" it often have their meals there.
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dude that myth was busted like ten years ago. Actually goldfish have a memory-span of at least three months and can distinguish between different shapes, colours and sounds.
In 2003 University of Plymouth student trained goldfishes to push a lever to earn a food reward but the lever was fixed to work only for an hour a day, the fish soon learned to activate it at the correct time.
People were told they had a 3 sec memory so they would not feel guilty about putting them in a small bowls, btw, research shows that goldfishes that are kept in bowls have shorter lifespans..
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