Collaborative Research: Opening a Quantitative Window into the Mind and Communication of Dolphins

Rockefeller University, New York NY

Investigators

Abstract

The cognitive and communication prowess of the large-brained, highly gregarious bottlenose dolphin is legendary and has captured the interest and imagination of scientists and the public at large. Notably, dolphins are one of a handful of species that are vocal learners; thus the dolphin presents us with a unique and alternative model to songbirds to advance our understanding of the processes that underlie vocal learning and communication in a large-brained mammal showing high social and behavioral complexity. Despite decades of research on dolphin vocal communication, the constituent elements, the sequential and temporal organization of the elements, and the nature of vocal transactions between dolphins remain enigmatic. In order to decipher dolphin communication and further elucidate these issues, the PIs will use observational approaches in the wild and in an aquarium as well as two experimental approaches in an aquarium. A first approach studies how dolphins coordinate their behavior in the face of novelty: How do dolphins synchronize their behavior when requested to present novel behaviors in tandem? How do they succeed in working as a team when confronted with a new challenge? In a second approach, the researchers will provide dolphins with a two-way, interactive touchscreen and audio system. Their proclivity for vocal learning and their other cognitive processes will be probed by giving them choice and control over the interactive system and observing and documenting how they use and respond to the contingencies of their interactions, which shall be obtaining novel acoustic signals temporally paired with objects, interactions or activities. The aquarium studies are particularly conducive to outreach efforts and informal science education since the dolphin-related activities will be conducted in an open amphitheater environment at a leading aquarium. The exhibit has changed from dolphin shows to more educational demonstrations about animal care, behavior, and conservation. The research activities will take place concurrently with visits of the public and field trips of school children and therefore, the research endeavor will be communicated to the public in real time. Virtually all the activities proposed can, with modest effort and cost, be made into an open exhibit at the National Aquarium in Baltimore, instructing visiting schoolchildren on the research process and on collaborative research across scientific boundaries. The field trips to the research sites are organized jointly with undergraduate and graduate courses in field research for Hunter College students and are excellent opportunities to showcase and engage actual cutting edge research to these students. This tightly-knit interdisciplinary collaboration between the labs of animal cognitive psychologist and marine mammal scientist and physicist, computational neuroscientist and bio-acoustician, seeks to and extend high-throughput settings to dolphin communication studies in captivity. A key intellectual merit of this proposal is to address these fundamental questions in the field of animal cognition and communication through powerful methods drawn from statistical mechanics, machine learning, and signal processing. Central technical problems in "decoding" dolphin communication are the difficulty in sound localization and attributing the detected vocalizations to specific individual dolphins, the lack of automated behavioral analysis methods, and the crucial step of creating an integrated picture of attributed vocal and behavioral transactions or "conversations" that can be subjected to high-through analysis. Another technical problem is the design and deployment of an advanced two-way interactive system consisting of an underwater touchpad and real-time audio input/output, plus the associated set of interaction interfaces. Finally, this project also addresses important technical problems in the deployment of aerial and aquatic drones for field studies.