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)
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- (C) 1998 Psychonomic Society, Inc.
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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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