These tools will no longer be maintained as of December 31, 2024. Archived website can be found here. PubMed4Hh GitHub repository can be found here. Contact NLM Customer Service if you have questions.


Pubmed for Handhelds

PUBMED FOR HANDHELDS

Search MEDLINE/PubMed

  • Title: Human listeners provide insights into echo features used by dolphins (Tursiops truncatus) to discriminate among objects.
    Author: Delong CM, Au WW, Harley HE, Roitblat HL, Pytka L.
    Journal: J Comp Psychol; 2007 Aug; 121(3):306-19. PubMed ID: 17696657.
    Abstract:
    Echolocating bottlenose dolphins (Tursiops truncatus) discriminate between objects on the basis of the echoes reflected by the objects. However, it is not clear which echo features are important for object discrimination. To gain insight into the salient features, the authors had a dolphin perform a match-to-sample task and then presented human listeners with echoes from the same objects used in the dolphin's task. In 2 experiments, human listeners performed as well or better than the dolphin at discriminating objects, and they reported the salient acoustic cues. The error patterns of the humans and the dolphin were compared to determine which acoustic features were likely to have been used by the dolphin. The results indicate that the dolphin did not appear to use overall echo amplitude, but that it attended to the pattern of changes in the echoes across different object orientations. Human listeners can quickly identify salient combinations of echo features that permit object discrimination, which can be used to generate hypotheses that can be tested using dolphins as subjects.
    [Abstract] [Full Text] [Related] [New Search]