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Which person is my trainer? Spontaneous visual discrimination of human individuals by bottlenose dolphins (Tursiops truncatus)

Bottlenose dolphins are known to use signature whistles to identify conspecifics auditorily. However, the way in which they recognize individuals visually is less well known. We investigated their visual recognition of familiar human individuals under the spontaneous discrimination task. In each tri...

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Detalles Bibliográficos
Autores principales: Tomonaga, Masaki, Uwano, Yuka, Ogura, Sato, Chin, Hyangsun, Dozaki, Masahiro, Saito, Toyoshi
Formato: Online Artículo Texto
Lenguaje:English
Publicado: Springer International Publishing 2015
Materias:
Acceso en línea:https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4502054/
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/26191479
http://dx.doi.org/10.1186/s40064-015-1147-8
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author Tomonaga, Masaki
Uwano, Yuka
Ogura, Sato
Chin, Hyangsun
Dozaki, Masahiro
Saito, Toyoshi
author_facet Tomonaga, Masaki
Uwano, Yuka
Ogura, Sato
Chin, Hyangsun
Dozaki, Masahiro
Saito, Toyoshi
author_sort Tomonaga, Masaki
collection PubMed
description Bottlenose dolphins are known to use signature whistles to identify conspecifics auditorily. However, the way in which they recognize individuals visually is less well known. We investigated their visual recognition of familiar human individuals under the spontaneous discrimination task. In each trial, the main trainer appeared from behind a panel. In test trials, two persons (one was the main trainer) appeared from the left and right sides of the panel and moved along the poolside in opposite directions. Three of the four dolphins spontaneously followed their main trainers significantly above the level of chance. Subsequent tests, however, revealed that when the two persons wore identical clothing, the following response deteriorated. This suggests that dolphins can spontaneously discriminate human individuals using visual cues, but they do not utilize facial cues, but body area for this discrimination.
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spelling pubmed-45020542015-07-17 Which person is my trainer? Spontaneous visual discrimination of human individuals by bottlenose dolphins (Tursiops truncatus) Tomonaga, Masaki Uwano, Yuka Ogura, Sato Chin, Hyangsun Dozaki, Masahiro Saito, Toyoshi Springerplus Research Bottlenose dolphins are known to use signature whistles to identify conspecifics auditorily. However, the way in which they recognize individuals visually is less well known. We investigated their visual recognition of familiar human individuals under the spontaneous discrimination task. In each trial, the main trainer appeared from behind a panel. In test trials, two persons (one was the main trainer) appeared from the left and right sides of the panel and moved along the poolside in opposite directions. Three of the four dolphins spontaneously followed their main trainers significantly above the level of chance. Subsequent tests, however, revealed that when the two persons wore identical clothing, the following response deteriorated. This suggests that dolphins can spontaneously discriminate human individuals using visual cues, but they do not utilize facial cues, but body area for this discrimination. Springer International Publishing 2015-07-16 /pmc/articles/PMC4502054/ /pubmed/26191479 http://dx.doi.org/10.1186/s40064-015-1147-8 Text en © Tomonaga et al. 2015 Open AccessThis article is distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons license, and indicate if changes were made.
spellingShingle Research
Tomonaga, Masaki
Uwano, Yuka
Ogura, Sato
Chin, Hyangsun
Dozaki, Masahiro
Saito, Toyoshi
Which person is my trainer? Spontaneous visual discrimination of human individuals by bottlenose dolphins (Tursiops truncatus)
title Which person is my trainer? Spontaneous visual discrimination of human individuals by bottlenose dolphins (Tursiops truncatus)
title_full Which person is my trainer? Spontaneous visual discrimination of human individuals by bottlenose dolphins (Tursiops truncatus)
title_fullStr Which person is my trainer? Spontaneous visual discrimination of human individuals by bottlenose dolphins (Tursiops truncatus)
title_full_unstemmed Which person is my trainer? Spontaneous visual discrimination of human individuals by bottlenose dolphins (Tursiops truncatus)
title_short Which person is my trainer? Spontaneous visual discrimination of human individuals by bottlenose dolphins (Tursiops truncatus)
title_sort which person is my trainer? spontaneous visual discrimination of human individuals by bottlenose dolphins (tursiops truncatus)
topic Research
url https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4502054/
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/26191479
http://dx.doi.org/10.1186/s40064-015-1147-8
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