I can’t see how this can be true because my fish, and I’m sure many million others know that when I open the lid, it’s time to eat. And that usually happens every eight hours or so.
So, what makes people think that fish have a three second memory?
On Mythbusters awhile ago, they taught fish to swim a maze to get to food. That would seem to prove that they do not have a three second memory.
It could either be memory, or the fact that when they see something coming, it could potentially be food. I notice our fish swimming to the front of the tank whenever someone comes near. In any case, I don’t imagine fish are very smart, but certainly smart enough to know that shadow on the tank = food.
I apologize for purely anecdotal evidence, but maybe it will give someone who does know something to debunk. My brother has two tanks in his apartment. He has the fish in one tank conditioned to swim to the top of the tank when he turns the light on, because he always feeds them right afterwards. If he turns the light on, and doesn’t feed them, they swim to the top, look confused in a fish-like way, and then go back to whatever it is that fish do. He only just started the second tank, and hasn’t really focused on conditioning them, but he does note that the fish in tank 2 don’t swim to the top when the light goes on, suggesting it’s not just a response to the stimulus of the light going on.
There’s quite a few articles about Dr. Phil Gee from the University of Plymouth and his research on fish memory. He didn’t have a definitive answer about your question but guessed -
There’s an interesting article here, which goes into a little more depth about his experiments.
My understanding is that someone confused fish with Fed Ex employees, and an urban legend was born.
Daniel
IANAC, but I was told on several occasions that this is true about horses. I saw one guy almost lose a kneecap when a horse took a swipe at him; he turned and punched it as hard as he could in the rump, explaining that after three seconds, the horse wouldn’t connect the cause with the effect.
I have to know; considering the very close timeframes in which this GQ was posted, and your comment was made, was it purely coincidence, or did you see this thread in GQ moments before making your comment in the other thread?
Nope, seems like an out-of-his-buttpuller to me.
Wait a minute, and I’ll ask Dorie…if I can only remember the question now! 
- Jinx
It’s easy to imagine that results could vary according to what species of fish is being investigated.
A few years ago Dr. James Rose, a neuropsychology professor at the University of Wyoming, claimed to have proved fish have a memory one-thirtieth of a second long. Of course he is an avid fisherman and could have an interest in proving that fishing is not inhumane.
You could probably google him. I read of his work in some fishing magazine- I can’t recall which one.
Wait, is conditioning considered memory? A lot of the examples mentioned above seem to be the former.
How can you condition something that doesn’t have a memory of longer than 3 seconds?
Pure coincidence.
Daniel
Well I did some more research on conditioning, read a lot about Skinner’s box and Pavlov, and decided to look a little further. I came across a ton of interesting sites discussing Culum Brown and an issue of Fish And Fisheries he edited, with many contributions from biologists around the world. Besides references to conditioned memory, I saw mention of olfactory and quite a bit on spatial memory in fish.
So to give a start point, I’ll link to an article which mentions the often quoted three second memory rule.
And further down, -
I found Culum’s home page with quite a few links to exerpts from that Fish And Fisheries, 2003, volume 4. One section I found particularly interesting Learning in fishes: from three second memory to culture (a .pdf) is quoted quite a bit in that first site I linked to.
There’s so much information on Culum’s site, I figured that’s probably enough for now. I’ve read more than I ever wanted to on salmon and olfactory memory, blind cave fish mental maps, bettas swimming mazes, and catfish responding to tones, heh.
The whole idea behind this question is whether it is cruel to goldfish to keep them in such a tiny goldfish bowl with nothing to do all day long. The answer (this poster’s question) is “No, because they only have a 3 second memory.”
The real question here is, are goldfish smart enough to be bored by being in the fishtank? I don’t think so.
The Mythbusters show on this was interesting, but it only dealt with conditioning the fish, not whether they could remember something. I don’t know how you could go about testing something like that.
And I agree with the last poster - conditioning is not the same as memory. I don’t think the fish actively thinks “Oh, the top is open. He’s about to give us food, so I will swim up there and get it.” I think it’s more like “Top open. Swim to open top. Oh, look, food!”
We had a VERY intelligent Betta fish for more than a year. It was the only fish I’ve ever known who would actually PLAY with people, and liked having people around. We kept its bowl in the center of our dining room table, and only fed it at dinner time, but it would perk up and start swimming fast whenever anyone walked into the room, regardless of the time of day. It’s main play activity was to chase the tip of a pen or pencil if you ran it along the outside of the bowl, and it would play this chasing game for LONG periods of time.
When we got the fish, we had a very elderly cat (18yo) who could no longer jump onto tables, and who had absolutely no interest in the fish at all. However, that cat died about a year after we got the fish, and we got two very young, active cats in her place. One of the cats LOVED the fish, and every day, we came home to find half the water missing from the bowl, water all over the table, and the fish cowering under a rock in the bowl.
We got an enclosed plastic box for the fish, and the fish was happy again, and played with people again.
The cat learned to push the plastic box around on the table, and one day, pushed the box over on its side, spilling out ALL the water. The Betta actually survived this, but we couldn’t keep it on the dining room table anymore, so it was relegated to a corner of the kitchen counter where the cat couldn’t see it (and where very few people went, either). After a couple of months, the fish died. We think it literally died of boredom and/or loneliness, because there were no signs of illness or infection prior to its death.