I’ve heard from a few places that goldfish have a memory of about 3 seconds. Fine. 3 seconds, 5 mintues, 10 years, whatever.
But HOW do they test a goldfish’s memeory? It’s not like they can get it to read a copy of “Goldfish Weekly” and then recite the top five reason why humans put those stupid little plastic diver guys in fish tanks, can they?
No, really, can they?
Just wondering.
This same question was asked just a few days ago although no clear cut answer was supplied.
http://boards.straightdope.com/sdmb/showthread.php?threadid=73276
a discussion about the same issue
There are ways to test animal memory of course (mazes, games, learned tasks etc. that tell us that dolphins, monkeys, parrots are intelligent creatures even though they can’t take a Stanford-Binet IQ test), but I have to say that my impression of this particular info is that it’s an urban legend…something “everyone knows” but nobody is really sure where the factoid came from. Perhaps it was a rationalization (or maybe just a lie) cooked up to help sell the infamous goldfish bowl.
jeez,mongrel, how did I miss that one. See what happens when you don’t visit General Questions every day?!?!
See the reason I ask is that I have my two little fishies trained. Well, sort of. They know two “tricks”. They will go to a certian part of the tank when I shake their food container and one of them will follow my finger if I trace little circles on the side of the tank.
So do they “remember” what I have taught them or is it just conditioning, and how to the two differ?