Auditory delayed matching in the bottlenose dolphin
- Herman, L. M. and Gordon, J. A.
(c) 1980 John Wiley and Sons
A bottlenose dolphin, already highly proficient
in two choice auditory discriminations, was trained over a nine
day period on auditory delayed matching to sample and then tested
on 346 unique matching problems, as a function of the delay between
the sample and test sounds. Each problem used new sounds and was
from five to ten trials long, with the same sound used as the sample
for all trials of a problem. At each trial, the sample was projected
underwater for 2.5 sec, followed by a delay and then by a sequence
of two first or second in the sequence, and randomly appeared at
either a left or right speaker. Responses to the locus of the matching
test sound were reinforced. Over nine, varying sized blocks of problems,
the longest delay of a set of delays in a block was progressively
increased from 15 sec initially to a final value of 120 sec. There
was a progressive increase across the early blocks in the percentage
of correct Trial 1 responses. A ceiling level of 100% correct responses
was then attained over the final six blocks, during which there
were 169 successive Trial 1 responses bracketed by two Trial 1 errors
(at 24 and 120 sec delays). Performance on trials beyond the first
followed a similar trend. Finally, when the sample duration was
decreased to 0.2 sec or less, matching performance on Trial 1 of
new problems dropped to chance levels.
Herman, L. M. and Gordon, J. A. (1974). Auditory delayed matching
in the bottlenosed dolphin. Journal of the Experimental Analysis
of Behavior, 21, 19-26.
Back to Top
Dolphin
Programs | Whale
Programs | Education
Programs | Our Research
| Resource Guide
Copyright © 2002, The Dolphin Institute
|