I noted that there was a recent surge in blog and media material on dolphins. It happens every so often. Dolphins are rescuing whales, communicating, growing legs and doing all kinds of crazy things. So I decided to try to find out more about what research is going on out there in the world of dolphins. In so searching, I discovered that there are a LOT of really ghetto 90’s era websites on the subject, and that 100% of all dolphin-related sites have a blue motif with cute dolphin-face highlights. It was like web surfing in a restroom in a children’s aquarium.
More importantly, I learned that there actually is quite a bit of research going on in order to learn how dolphins do what they do.
Take this paper by Adam Pack and Louis Herman of the University of Hawaii (2007). The paper was published in the Journal of Comparative Psychology, not to be confused with Comparative Neurology (anatomical differences across species), Comparative Psychiatry (medical comparison of species) or Comparative Literature (study of books written across species. It’s still burgeoning.)
They wanted to study a phenomenon called “joint attention” (not a drug reference), which, as they describe it, is the ability to see the gaze or the attention of another and align to it.
Example: you know the scene in a comedy show when someone is talking to a friend, and that someone is talking a lot of smack about some jerk, and the jerk walks into the room while the person is talking and stands behind him, and the friend looks just past the person’s face, sees the the jerk, and stares? And then the person says something like, “he’s standing right behind me, isn’t he?” and the friend nods and runs out of the room, and it’s funny every time? That’s what we’re talking about.
It is the ability to recognize that prolonged glances are the result of attention, and that anything demanding the attention of one might just be worth your attention, too. Apes and dogs can do this. These guys had already shown that dolphins can respond to basic head gaze (and not eye gaze, which is interesting because it may mean that they think of our nose as our third pointer finger, probably because their own noses are their only real pointers).
The study consisted of trying to teach dolphins to react in a more advanced way to glance communication. They used dolphins who already knew that pointing was communication. In the experiment, researchers placed objects in the water, gazed at one, and then got the dolphin to respond by finding a matching object. They also tested the dolphin’s geometric understanding by gazing at something on the opposite side of a distracted object. To do this, they had to teach the dolphins the concept of matching. They did pretty good. It turns out that their geometry wasn’t that great– they compared it to and infant level– but they were able to pick up the meaning of the gaze pretty quickly, indicating a level of understanding beyond a simple reactionary training.
I’m not sure what the next step would be for me if I were doing this work. What would be really cool is if they could train the dolphins to train other dolphins to do the same thing (i. e. give the top dolphin a verbal cue, have that dolphin look at an object, and have one of its cronies get the match.) Maybe in a few more years.
Now, I don’t know how much this actually teaches me about the world. Nor does this comparison teach me much about myself, except that I shouldn’t get a big head just because I can look where other people look. It really only says that dolphins get the meaning of gaze. But pure research doesn’t have to have a moral, does it? Nor does a blog entry, for that matter.
http://www.dolphin-institute.org/our_research/pdf/Pack-and-Herman-2007b.pdf
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