Animal Learning and Behavior 1998,
26 (2), 210-218
Memory for recent actions in the bottlenosed dolphin (Tursiops
truncatus): Repetition of arbitrary behaviors using an abstract
rule
- Eduardo Mercado III, Scott O. Murray, Robert K Uyeyama, Adam
A. Pack, and Louis M. Herman
- Kewalo Basin Marine Mammal Laboratory (1129 Ala Moana Blvd.,
Honolulu, Hawaii 96814) and Department of Psychology, University
of Hawaii)
-
- (C) 1998 Psychonomic Society, Inc.
-
Little is known about how animals represent their own actions
in working memory. We investigated whether bottlnosed dolphins
could recall actions they had recently performed and reveal those
recollections using an abstract rule. Two dolphins were trained
to resopnd toa specific gestural command by repeating the last
behavior performed. Both dolphins proved to be able to repeat
a wide variety of behaviors on command and were able to generalize
the repeating rule to novel behaviors and situations. One dolphin
was able to repeat all 36 behaviors she was tested on, including
behaviors involving multiple simultaneous actions and self-selected
behaviors. These results suggest that dolphins can flexibly access
memories of their recent actions and that these memoreies are
of sufficient detail to allow for reenactments. The repeating
task can potentially be used to investigate short-term action
and event representations in a variety of species. (C) 1998 Psychonomic
Society, Inc.
- Mercado, E. III, Murray, S. O., Uyeyama, R.K., Pack, A. A.,
& Herman, L. M. (1998). Memory for recent actions in the bottlenosed
dolphin (Tursiops truncatus ): Repetition of arbitrary behaviors
using an abstract rule. Animal Learning and Behavior 26, 210-218.
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