Fish 1 Second Memory ?

According to Culum Brown from Macquarie University, "Fish are more intelligent than they appear. In many areas, such as memory, their cognitive powers match or exceed those of ‘higher’ vertebrates including non-human primates."

But if you want you can totally ignore his years of work and research and just believe what you want based on theory.

 

memory is defined as the ability to store, recall, and retain information. classical conditioning is considered retention and recall of stored information no matter what way you look at it...
fish have memories.

 

not true, my clowns "love" eachother.. Ive seen it and what it can produce ;D

 

I took an animal behavior class in college, and this is a very debated issue within the scientific community. Many scientists feel that animals have feelings and some cognitive ability, whereas some scientists don't. You just have to research and make your own opinions.

However, my RG has definitely learned to behave when I'm around or he gets "scared" by my finger. Just like my dog, she will tear up a paper towel and eat it when I'm not around, but when I'm with her, she won't even touch a paper towel. She knows she's not supposed to do it. She's learned that she gets in trouble if I'm there.

Many animals even make tools, like crows and chimps for example. That is obvious thinking and problem solving ability.

 

completely agree

I'm not ignoring it, you are missing my point. Which I will expand upon below dingo...

yes I agree. you guys are getting into technical info. OP asked a pretty basic question and I was merely getting at the common idea of what a memory is.

I think a lot of folks think their fish know them personally and remember them by their pretty smile, perhaps even talk and miss their families back in the ocean. it's a lot more basic than that. very primitive.

a fish isn't aware of its memory (as far as we know). a lot of what people attribute to memory is simply conditioning. that's all i was driving at.


like i said earlier, i'll cede it.

you guys keep on thinking your fish miss you when you're away j/k guys ;D

 

that is a behavioral instinct (reproduction)... one of the drives that EVERY organism possesses

 

Understood. Sorry, I let my Biology geek side get to me.

 

why so serious

 

Dude, that is a creepy smilie.

 

I think a problem here is that there are different definitions of what a "memory" is. Does it mean an animal can recognise things it has seen/heard/smelled before and distinguish them from something new? Or does it mean an animal can recall those things when they're not around and "think of them"? I would say by the first definition, yes, fish definitely have a memory. By the second definiton... I don't know.

Also remember that there are two different types of conditioning, with more or less cognitive involvement.
When we talk about Pawlow's dog, we talk about classical conditioning, when a certain stimulus (like the ring of a bell) is associated to another stimulus (food) because they repeatedly appear together or within a short time frame. That way an involuntary response to one stimulus (salvia production when smelling food) is connected to the other stimulus and will be shown even when the original source for the reaction is not present. So if you ring a bell everytime you give your dog food, after some time the dog will response the same way to the bell alone as it would response to food, by producing more salvia. The important thing is that we talk about involuntary responses here, no conscious decisions, but automatic, reflexive processes. The dog is not thinking "oh wait, there's that bell again, and everytime that bell rings, I get food in a second, yeah, yummy food incoming, I better produce salvia!!" - it's the autonomic nervous system that's doing the work here, not conscious memory.

Then there's operant conditioning, and that's where something like a memory comes in. When a certain behaviour (like attacking other fish) is repeatedly met with a positive or negative consequence (getting frightened by a finger stabbed at oneself) that behaviour will in turn be shown more or less frequent, because the individual learned that its behaviour will have consequences and tries to avoid harm or to get a reward. For this process, there has to be some kind of conscious memory involved because we're talking about behaviour, not just automatic responses of the body. The animal has to remember the consequences the behaviour had or otherwise it wouldn't change the frequency of that behaviour.

Actually, that is not correct. The fish did not forget, but instead learned that he will only get negative consequences for harassing other fish if there's someone standing in front of the tank. The presence of the owner is a cue for the fish for when to show the learned behavious (stop harassing other fish) and when not.

Classical and operant conditioning are often intermixed in learning processes and can rarely be seperated as neatly as the theory suggest, but I would think if an animal changes its conscious behaviour (as in, not reflexes or unconscious processes like salvia production) due to consequences it has experienced, it's safe to assume that animal has some kind of memory which is longer than just one second