Goldfish Can Learn More Than a Three-Second Trick

The “three-second” myth has no reliable scientific basis. Goldfish can be trained: in a color-discrimination experiment, they retained what they had learned when tested two weeks later. A separate student project published by the American Museum of Natural History reported that fish found food in a maze faster after breaks of up to six months, but this was not a peer-reviewed study. We found no reliable support for a general claim of memories lasting years. Retention depends on the task; there is no single universal “memory span.” The illustration is AI-generated.