Students: Makali Haines and Sophia Hallam
Mentor: Shala Hankison (OWU Department of Zoology)
Music plays a big role in our daily lives, but when it comes to the animal world many species don’t react to our music, but that’s not to say they can’t react. In a previous study by scientists at Israeli Technion Institute of Technology and lead by Kazutaka Shinozuka in 2013 goldfish didn’t show a preference towards an example of our music but rather they showed and discrimination and avoidance to one. From that we hypothesized that goldfish could be trained to discriminate human made music genres from certain sound cues. The goldfishes’ tests did not come out significant, but some tests had a p-value of 0.061. Although this does not prove the discriminant ability of our musical genres of these fish it could suggest that with improved training it could be possible.
More information about this project in Digital Commons @ OWU