- Animal Learning & Behavior 2001, 29(3), 250-264
The bottlenosed dolphin's (Tursiops truncatus) understanding
of gestures as symbolic representations of its body parts
- Louis M. Herman, David S. Matus, Elia Y.K. Herman, Marina Ivancic,
& Adam A. Pack
Kewalo Basin Marine Mammal Lboratory, 1129 Ala Moana Blvd., Honolulu,
HI, USA, 96814
-
- (C) 2001 Psychonomic Society, Inc.
We assigned gestural symbols to nine body parts of a bottlenosed
dolphin (Tursiops truncatus). The dolphin was first trained
to touch any floating object it chose with the body part indicated
by a gestural symbol. In Experiment 1, we tested the dolphin's
ability to now touch specific gesturally referenced objects
using specific gesturally referenced body parts. In Experiment
2, we tested its ability to either touch or toss gesturally referenced
objects with gesturally referenced body parts or to simply display
those body parts or shake them back and fotth. The acts of touching,
tossing, displaying, and shaking were each associated with specific
gestures and appeared in random sequences within test sessions.
The results demonstrated highly significant levels of performance
throughout these tasks, including many successes on the first
occasions of new body-part uses. These findings provided strong
evidence that the gestural symbols we used for body parts were
semantically processed and understood by the dolphin as representing
those body parts.
Herman, L.M., Matus, D.S., Herman, E.Y.K., Ivancic, M., &
Pack, A.A. (2001). The bottlenosed dolphin's (Tursiops truncatus)
understanding of gestures as symbolic representations of its body
parts. Animal Learning & Behavior, 29(3), 250-264.
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