you have never saw mithbusters dont you…

You have never learn grammer do you…

Sometimes doing it yourself trumps watching it on TV.

maybe australia doesnt get mythbusters?

This is procedural memory, which is different than declarative memory. Procedural memory is the memory you have when you know how to do stuff, like type or put on contacts, its not something people or fish for that matter actively think about. The memory people are conscious of is declarative or episodic memory, where they remember facts or events in there life.

I doubt fish have declarative memory because they can’t answer questions, but i think the three seconds refer to the episodic memory, which is what they actually remember about their lives. This you can’t devise an experiment to check. The experiment described actually tests the fish working memory, which, though might be quite impressive has nothing to do with the subjective experience fish have of their tanks. Still, impressive work for a fifteen year old.

They’re FISH. I think they’d take being in that tank over being on my plate any day of the week.

well.. golden fish… which is in fact orange… first thought…
my second thought is… can anyone explain why they never hit the glass too hard trying to swim just a little bit more ahead? do golden fish know they’re in a glass tank? because… they change tanks from the stores to our homes.. sometimes in plastic bags.. just like “bubble-boy” :-S well… i have one fact that seems to prove they are 3-second-dumbs …. you just have to keep feeding them non-stop… and you’ll see the result! hahaha.. they forget they already ate and eat some more… count how much time the fish remains within bites.. maybe you get to some great conclusion!

clap clap clap for Mr. Rory Stokes, a 15-year-old schoolboy … impressive experiment.. or not….

The only thing preventing me from eating goldfish is that they are too small to be worth it. If they have anything worth remembering it’s that.

This is not a news story. Mythbusters did this ages ago – yes we do get it here in Aus. Obviously whoever thought this was a news story hasn’t seen it. Rory has probably seen it also.

“I think the three seconds refer to the episodic memory”
If there is not experiment to test this, there is no way to know this in the first place. Thereofre, then chances of this being true are slim, as it would just be a random guess.

The kid says “They can retain that knowledge indefinitely if they use it regularly”
Can he back this assertion up?
And why is it cruel to captivate an animal with memory. I doubt it has ever complained about it.

May I humbly suggest a new headline:

“15 year old boy follows scientific method and learns something all on his own.”

Catch up with this shocking story of self-discovery by staring mute at your TV screen whilst sitting on the couch, shoveling your dinner into your mouth. Join with us as we ostracise him by calling him names like “Brainiac” and compare his work to something we once saw on the TV several years ago.
You too can feel superior to the-boy-who-wanted-to-learn by inventing some theory to explain why his conclusions are wrong, even in the face of experimental evidence, and further stating that it is impossible to test your theory because you can’t talk to Goldfish.

Don’t worry about trying to learn for yourself. Everything you will ever need to know can be looked up on the internet.

Thanks conrath and Jason. I’m glad you made this point with greater psychological/neuroscientific sophistication than I currently possess. I did grasp that there was something amiss–since it seems obvious that there’s a difference between automatized behavior and conscious recall of data.

I suspect that it’s exactly this type of equivocation of declarative and episodic memory (or automatized behavior and conscious recall) that this kid and others rely upon in order to blur the line between human and animal cognition–and then come to conclusions like “it’s cruel to keep fish in tiny tanks”.

On a side note–even if it were true that fish had all sorts of amazing memory abilities, it wouldn’t make a lick of difference with respect to the crucial distinction between Man and other animals: the rational (conceptual) faculty. (Of course, that’s a much more involved topic.)

My wife’s angel fish knows how to look sad and hungry at the corner of the tank by door. If you walk by and glance over it will be staring at you until you pop a little shrimp pellet in. After that one pellet it just swims away happy as can be. Then the rest of her fish notice the movement and pool near the top waiting for their flakes.

teaching an animal (any animal, including a human) to behave in a certain way in order to receive a reward (or, less effectively, avoid a punishment) is called conditioning…. and it is not the same as memory. Saying that a fish “remembers” to swim to a beacon for food is therefore inaccurate. Zeh probably had it closer when he said that a fish will eat itself to death because it doesn’t remember that it has just eaten

OK, firstly I am actually the Rory Stokes from the story.

Yes, it is no big newsflash, it just sounds good in the newspapers. It has been proven before, I was more aiming to find it out for myself and in the process help dispel the myth. I find it amazing that people can still beleive it, and yet I still meet people who do.

However, my experiment did get some results that none of the media picked up on. Firstly, the fish remembered fine after 6 days, then 6 weeks, and even after 6 months they still came to the beacon. I was beggining to suspect that they were just curious, but just the other day (12 months after the experiment) they completely ignored it when I put it in.

Also, for a few days I used a different coloured beacon, and they were actually afraid of it, and instead of coming to the surface and waiting for food, they got as far away as they could. This suggested that they were actually percieving different colours, and specifically associating the one colour with food.

Finally: yes my experiment did not deserve anywhere near the media response it got, however my method etc were good enough to win me first place in the statewide Oliphant Science Awards experiment category, as well as into the top 14 in Australia for the BHP Billiton Science awards.

oh and one last thing, pavlov and zeh: fish won’t eat themselves to death. even if they couldn’t remember, they would be able to tell when they are full.
What you are experiencing is a new thing a few people have discovered called ‘hunger’

Quite often I have a big laugh when I hear people talk about animals and what they can or can’t do.

Once they start saying “this animal isn’t able to… ” I ask them “Ever been one ?” and in most cases all I get is silence in return.

It’s a good thing to question every assumption made, even… when Mythbusters already proved or disproved it.

Check my website for more info

well since i am a dork, i know that considering coming ubiquitous era, three problems about utilization of ICT (information-communication technology) are extracted. The first problem is production type of software viewed from the global point. Software production generally adopts module-type which is carried out only based on interface definition, and then, offshore-type production (by overseas commitment) is increasing. This article explains software production in India, China and Vietnam and describes the policy that Japan should adopt to this condition. The second is high level utilization of web information. Explosive increase in information amount on the Internet threatens to degrade efficiency of information collection. To cope with it, data mining becomes important which analyzes a large amount of information and extracts or finds useful information. The third is to establish users’ moral to enhance networks’ reliability.

Way cool science experiment by 15 yr old. From the page: “Over a three week period, Rory trained his goldfish to swim to a beacon in order to obtain food. Over the three week period, the time taken by the fish to reach the beacon reduced from over a minute to less than five seconds.”

We get Mythbusters…..

memory or conditioning? :/

This is quite a wrong conclusion. There was a man “HM” who had his Medial Temporal Lobes removed for epileptic treatment in the 50′s. He was no long able to remember anything that was not ongoing, or that he hadn’t previously learned (if you walked out of a room and returned shortly thereafter he did not know who you were). He was however able to do just this task, a conditioned response (beacon-food experiment)… he was able to retain and improve on his score despite not remembering having previously completed the task. This is because the brain subconsciously was able to store the intrinsic memories which could not be extrinsically stored or consciously retrieved.

All this 15 yo has done is proven that he can condition an animal like scientists have been able to do for decades. This does not mean that the fish is able to remember it.

By the way, all this information is gathered from my Experimental Psychology class with a world-class cognitive neuroscientist with a Ph.D, funny enough he actually went over almost this exact dilemma.

“My results strongly showed that goldfish can retain knowledge for at
least six days. They can retain that knowledge indefinitely if they use
it regularly,” said Rory.

No it doesn’t prove that. It shows that this particular fish is able to do so,  nothing else. You need more studies, and a lot more fish to prove anything.