The research study that taught rats to drive was one of the things I wrote about in 2019. The goldfish who learned how to drive in a fish-operated vehicle were not mammals, but lab animals.
Most people will ask the first question at this point. Driving is an activity that reduces stress levels in rats, and it was found in the study that was done in 2019. Shachar Givon and his colleagues at Ben-Gurion University of the Negev conducted a study to discover something a little different.
The idea was to see if the fishes' navigation skills are universal and work in extremely unfamiliar environments. Driving a tank inside a research lab is a pretty unfamiliar environment for a goldfish.
How fast does the fish tank go?
The FOV is a fishtank on wheels. There are no physical controls for the fish to learn to use. The camera tracks the fish's position in the tank. If the fish is near one of the tank walls and facing the other way, that's where the fish-control algorithm comes in. If the FOV comes within 20 cm of the walls of the terrestrial environment, a 4 x 3 meter enclosure, a lidar sensor on the same mast overrides the fish control algorithm.
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Six fish were taught to drive in 30 minute sessions three times a week and every two days. The fish were given a reward if they were able to navigate to a pink corrugated board from the center of the enclosure.
The fish learned to drive the FOV and became more proficient in its operation as time went on, both in terms of achieving tasks and in the time taken to complete them. The authors wanted to make sure that the fish weren't just learning a set of movements to get a reward, so they repeated some tests with a new starting position inside the enclosure or added decoy targets that were different colors.
The goldfish were able to deal with the changes and approach targets from different angles, suggesting that they have an internal representation of the world around them. The interface between the air, the tank's plexiglass walls, and the water would create a different look in fish-vision than the environment in which those fish eyes evolved.
The jokes would have us believe that goldfish are not as smart as they are.
Behavioral brain research. Thebbr.2021.113711 is an About DOI.
