REAL LIFE NEWS: CLEVER FISH
by Hazed
Fish may have the reputation of being really dumb, but new research shows that actually they are a lot brighter than you think.
Researchers in the UK, from the University of Bath and London’s Queen Mary University, teamed up to explore how zebrafish perceive the deep sea that surrounds them, and to test whether the fish could respond to several different sources of stimulus at the same time.
Parallel visual search has only been seen in mammals before, but when the researchers showed the zebrafish a series of coloured discs, they learned that the colour red meant food and would choose it in preference to all the other colours. This showed they were using parallel visual search.
Dr Michael Proulx, of the University of Bath’s Department of Psychology, said: “Although vision seems simple and quick, it involves a lot of computational power. It is incredible to discover that the zebrafish brain, with its small size and simple structure, can seemingly find a target visually without getting slower. No matter how many items we added to the scene to distract the fish, they had no problem responding at the same speed every time.”
Sounds like the fish do not eat algae that contains the stupidity virus!
Source: http://www.theregister.co.uk/2014/10/31/fish_are_a_whole_lot_smarter_than_we_ever_knew/
