Video: How Israeli scientists trained a goldfish to ‘drive’

Picture this: A goldfish swimming in a square tank on wheels as it rolls deliberately from one side of a room to the other.

It’s not a scene from a children’s book or a futuristic movie. It’s an animal behavior experiment at Israel’s Ben-Gurion University of the Negev, where researchers have successfully trained several goldfish to operate a robotic vehicle in an effort to explore whether their species is capable of navigating on land.

And it turns out they just might be, according to findings published in the journal Behavioural Brain Research.

“The study hints that navigational ability is universal rather than specific to the environment,” said Shachar Givon, a Ph.D. student and one of the paper’s authors. “Second, it shows that goldfish have the cognitive ability to learn a complex task in an environment completely unlike the one they evolved in. As anyone who has tried to learn how to ride a bike or to drive a car knows, it is challenging at first.”

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I am excited to share a new study led by Shachar Givon & @MatanSamina w/ Ohad Ben Shahar: Goldfish can learn to navigate a small robotic vehicle on land. We trained goldfish to drive a wheeled platform that reacts to the fish’s movement (https://t.co/ZR59Hu9sib). pic.twitter.com/J5BkuGlZ34

— Ronen Segev (@ronen_segev) January 3, 2022

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