new publication on dolphin cognition

We are pleased to inform you of the following new publication on bottlenosed dolphin cognition. For pdf reprints, please contact Dr. Adam Pack at pack@hawaii.edu. I am out with our field project studying Maui's humpback whales right now, so email contact is best.

Pack, A. A. & Herman, L. M. (2007). The dolphin's (Tursiops truncatus) understanding of human gazing and pointing: Knowing what and where. Journal of Comparative Psychology, 121, 34-45.

The authors tested whether the understanding by dolphins (Tursiops truncatus) of human pointing and head-gazing cues extends to knowing the identity of an indicated object as well as its location. In
Experiment 1, the dolphins Phoenix and Akeakamai processed the identity of a cued object (of 2 that
were present), as shown by their success in selecting a matching object from among 2 alternatives
remotely located. Phoenix was errorless on first trials in this task. In Experiment 2, Phoenix reliably

responded to a cued object in alternate ways, either by matching it or by acting directly on it, with each type of response signaled by a distinct gestural command given after the indicative cue. She never confused matching and acting. In Experiment 3, Akeakamai was able to process the geometry of pointing cues (but not head-gazing cues), as revealed by her errorless responses to either a proximal or distal object simultaneously present, when each object was indicated only by the angle at which the informant pointed. The overall results establish that these dolphins could identify, through indicative cues alone, what a human is attending to as well as where.