Goldfish Memory

Hwom

Hwom

AC Members
Jun 16, 2009
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Oregon, IL
I heard that a goldfishes memory is only 3 seconds. Do you believe this? I dont personally. My goldfish seems to remember me and where i feed him in the tank.
 
mythbusters tested this once. they set up a maze for goldfish, and taught them how to get thru the maze. the next day, they tried to see if the goldfish remebered how to get thru the maze, and it did.

so there you go. memory is longer than a couple of seconds, but i forgot how many days/weeks their memory is specifically, sorry. lol
 
I think that perhaps it is fair to say that they are simple-minded at best, and that almost anything they do more than once can be traced back to a motivation to eat or mate.

That said, if you're patient enough, they can be trained to do simple feats or tricks. It's just a matter of conditioning them to think they'll get fed. (Which they would anyways, but they don't necessarily remember that. :evil_lol: )
 
I wouldn't go as far as saying smart, but they are really curious and remember things. Anything for food...
 
I saw that Mythbusters episode recently and what they did was they taught goldfish to associate they color orange with food then had the gold fish swim through a maze of dividers with holes bordered by orange and the goldfish swam from one side of the tank through the holes in the dividers to the other side where there was food to fast for it to be luck. The Mythbusters also talked to a biologist and expert on goldfish who said that conditioning IS memory.
The process of teaching the goldfish took awhile.
 
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