Bottlenose dolphins performing echolocation tasks at long ranges may utilize a transmission mode where bursts, or "packets," of echolocation clicks are emitted rather than single clicks. The clicks within each packet are separated by time intervals well below the two-way travel time, while the packets themselves are emitted at intervals greater than the two-way travel time. Packet use has been shown to increase with range; however, the exact function of packets and the advantages gained by their utilization remain unknown. In this study, the capability for dolphins to utilize multi-echo processing within packets of echoes was investigated by manipulating the number of available echoes within each packet as a dolphin performed a long-range echolocation task. The results showed an improvement in detectability with an increase in the number of echoes in each packet and suggest that packet use is an adaptation to allow multi-echo processing at long ranges without introducing range ambiguity.

In matched filter processing, a stored template of the emitted sonar pulse is compared to echoes to locate individual replicas of the emitted pulse embedded in the echo stream. A number of experiments with bats have suggested that bats utilize matched filter processing for target ranging, but not for target detection. For dolphins, the few available data suggest that dolphins do not utilize matched filter processing. In this study, the effect of time-reversing a dolphin's emitted click was investigated. If the dolphin relied upon matched filter processing, time-reversal of the click would be expected to reduce the correlation between the (unaltered) click and the echoes and therefore lower detection performance. Two bottlenose dolphins were trained to perform a phantom echo detection task. On a small percentage of trials ("probe trials"), a dolphin's emitted click was time-reversed before interacting with the phantom echo system. Data from the normal and time-reversed trials were then analyzed and compared. There were no significant differences in detection performance or click emissions between the normal and time-reversed conditions for either subject, suggesting that the dolphins did not utilize matched filter processing for this echo detection task.