Imitative Behaviour By Indian Ocean Bottlenose Dolphins (t uRsiops Aduncus) in Captivity

Tayler, C. K.; Saayman, Graham S.

doi:10.1163/156853973x00436

Cited by 120 publications

(54 citation statements)

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“…For instance, in an early anecdotal report, dolphins were seen to imitate a scuba diver cleaning algae from the window of their tank. Not only did the dolphins use an object to scrub algae off the window, but they also released bubbles in bouts while doing so and made sounds described as being almost identical to those of the diver's air-demand valve (Tayler & Saayman, 1973). Such performances strongly suggest that dolphins can flexibly reproduce sounds other than those in their natural repertoire and will occasionally do so in contexts where sound imitation serves no obvious functional purpose.…”

Section: Multidimensional Sound Imitation By Bottlenose Dolphinsmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Anecdotal reports of dolphins spontaneously producing "unnatural" sounds similar to ones they were exposed to in their surroundings provided additional evidence that dolphins could modify their vocalizations to match environmental features (Caldwell & Caldwell, 1972;Tayler & Saayman, 1973). More formal studies of spontaneous imitation in dolphins later confirmed that they reproduced components of computer-generated whistles after as few as 2-20 exposures (Hooper, Reiss, Carter, & McCowan, 2006;Reiss & McCowan, 1993), and that dolphins replicated not only individual sounds, but also rhythmic patterns of sounds (Crowell, Harley, Fellner, & Larsen-Plott, 2005).…”

Section: Multidimensional Sound Imitation By Bottlenose Dolphinsmentioning

confidence: 99%

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Imitating Sounds: A Cognitive Approach to Understanding Vocal Imitation

Mercado¹,

Mantell²,

Pfordresher³

2014

CCBR

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Vocal imitation is often described as a specialized form of learning that facilitates social communication and that involves less cognitively sophisticated mechanisms than more "perceptually opaque" types of imitation. Here, we present an alternative perspective. Considering current evidence from adult mammals, we note that vocal imitation often does not lead to learning and can involve a wide range of cognitive processes. We further suggest that sound imitation capacities may have evolved in certain mammals, such as cetaceans and humans, to enhance both the perception of ongoing actions and the prediction of future events, rather than to facilitate mate attraction or the formation of social bonds. The ability of adults to voluntarily imitate sounds is better described as a cognitive skill than as a communicative learning mechanism. Sound imitation abilities are gradually acquired through practice and require the coordination of multiple perceptual-motor and cognitive mechanisms for representing and generating sounds. Understanding these mechanisms is critical to explaining why relatively few mammals are capable of flexibly imitating sounds, and why individuals vary in their ability to imitate sounds. Keywords: mimicry; copying; social learning; singing; emulation; imitatible; convergence; imitativenessIn his seminal text, Habitat and Instinct, Lloyd Morgan (1896, p. 166) describes two general kinds of imitation: instinctive imitation and intelligent or voluntary imitation. The examples he provides of intelligent imitation mostly involve reproducing sounds-a child copies words used by his companions, a mockingbird imitates the songs of 32 other bird species, a jay imitates the neighing of a horse, and so on. In fact, most of the examples of "imitation proper" that Morgan provides consist of birds reproducing the sounds of other species. Similarly, Romanes (1884) focuses almost exclusively on reports of birds imitating songs, music, and speech in his discussion of imitation. These classic portrayals of vocal reproductions as providing the best and clearest examples of imitation stand in stark contrast to current psychological discussions of imitation, which often classify examples such as those given by Romanes and Morgan as non-imitative performances that merely resemble actual imitation (Byrne, 2002;Heyes, 1996). When did phenomena that were once considered archetypal examples of voluntary imitation transform into a footnote of modern cognitive theories? Was some discovery made that fundamentally changed our scientific understanding of the processes underlying vocal imitation? Have psychologists or biologists succeeded in explaining what vocal imitation is and how it works to the point where little can be gained from further study? Or, have theoretical assumptions led scientists to underestimate the cognitive mechanisms required for an individual to be able to flexibly imitate sounds?In the present article, we attempt to identify what exactly vocal imitation entails, and to assess whether current explanatory fr...

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Section: Multidimensional Sound Imitation By Bottlenose Dolphinsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Section: Multidimensional Sound Imitation By Bottlenose Dolphinsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Imitating Sounds: A Cognitive Approach to Understanding Vocal Imitation

Mercado¹,

Mantell²,

Pfordresher³

2014

CCBR

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“…In particular, they have shown the ability to report on the presence or absence of named objects in their environment (Herman & Forestell, 1985) and to report, through behavioral mimicry, on the behaviors of other animals, including dolphins, seals, and humans (Herman, Pack, & Morrel-Samuels, 1993;Tayler & Saayman, 1973;Xitco, 1988). Mimicry abilities were placed under stimulus control and shown to be generalizable to novel behaviors that had not been previously mimicked or performed and that were not part ofthe dolphins' natural behavioral repertoire.…”

mentioning

confidence: 99%

Memory for recent actions in the bottlenosed dolphin (Tursiops truncatus): Repetition of arbitrary behaviors using an abstract rule

Mercado

Murray

Uyeyama

et al. 1998

Animal Learning & Behavior

102

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Little is known about how animals represent their own actions in working memory. We investigated whether bottlenosed dolphins could recall actions they had recently performed and reveal those recollections using an abstract rule. Two dolphins were trained to respond to a 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 memories 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.Animals act under the influence of mental representations that result from a variety of internal and external factors. Understanding how animals create, activate, and manipulate such representations is a central concern for studies ofanimal learning and memory. A variety of techniques (e.g., delayed matching-to-sample tasks and maze tasks) have been developed to gain access to "unobservable" neural representational systems (for a review, see Roitblat, 1982Roitblat, , 1987. These techniques have been used extensively to investigate how animals represent external stimuli (e.g., objects, sounds, locations, and events) that they have experienced in the recent past. In contrast, few studies have investigated how animals represent recent internal events, such as the production of behaviors. Consequently, more is currently known about how animals represent environmental conditions in working memory than about how they represent their recent actions. An animal's short-term memory for its own actions can be interpreted as a type ofmetaknowledge; self-reports based on such memories can be used to measure an animal's ability to explicitly recall past behaviors (Shimp, 1982).

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“…In this vein, Kuczaj et al contribute their own compelling data on dolphin imitation. Not only do they find cases of action-level imitation (like that recorded by Taylor & Saayman 1973), but also what they consider simple program-level imitation. After observing a human use a simple tool to release food, dolphins copied the principle -but having no hands, they used different motor actions.…”

Section: R24 From Cetacean Biologymentioning

confidence: 86%

When actions are carved at the joints

1998

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We focus on Byrne & Russon's argument that program-level imitation is driven by hierarchically organized goals, and the related claim that to establish whether observed behavior is evidence of program-level imitation, empirical studies of imitation must use multi-stage actions as imitative tasks. We agree that goals play an indispensable role in the generation of action and imitative behavior but argue that multi-goal tasks, not only multi-stage tasks, reveal program-level imitation.

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Imitative Behaviour By Indian Ocean Bottlenose Dolphins (t uRsiops Aduncus) in Captivity

Cited by 120 publications

References 5 publications

Imitating Sounds: A Cognitive Approach to Understanding Vocal Imitation

Imitating Sounds: A Cognitive Approach to Understanding Vocal Imitation

Memory for recent actions in the bottlenosed dolphin (Tursiops truncatus): Repetition of arbitrary behaviors using an abstract rule

When actions are carved at the joints

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