Social and Behavioral Sciences Commons^™

Fish Are Flexible Learners Who Can Discriminate Human Faces, Ulrike E. Siebeck

Animal Sentience

In his book “What a fish knows” Jonathan Balcombe (2016a, b) has created a comprehensive profile of a group of animals still often thought to have a 3-second memory, no ability to feel pain, and a generally limited ability to learn. Chapter by chapter, Balcombe dismantles these and other such assumptions and makes a convincing case that fish have many abilities that are not that different from our own. Here, I focus on one example which supports the notion that fish are flexible learners and able to perform tasks which are generally thought to require the advanced processing power of …