Do goldfish like to be informed?

Area of Science:

• Comparative psychology
• Animal behavior
• Neuroscience

Background:

• Many species, including humans, birds, and mammals, show a preference for predictable future events, even without direct benefits.
• It remains unclear if this preference stems from basic associative learning or a more complex information-seeking drive akin to curiosity.

Purpose of the Study:

• To investigate if goldfish, which share reinforcement learning mechanisms with birds and mammals, exhibit a preference for predictable outcomes.
• To determine if basic conditioning processes are sufficient to explain paradoxical preferences for unusable information.

Main Methods:

• Goldfish were presented with two choices, both offering a delay and a chance of reward.
• One option provided a stimulus correlated with the upcoming outcome (informative), while the other provided an uncorrelated stimulus (non-informative).

Main Results:

• Goldfish could distinguish between the informative and non-informative options.
• However, goldfish did not develop a preference for the informative option over the non-informative one.

Conclusions:

• Associative learning mechanisms in goldfish are insufficient to generate preferences for outcome predictability.
• These findings challenge the idea that informative preferences are merely a byproduct of associative processes and suggest specialized information-seeking mechanisms may have evolved in some vertebrates.