Hearing "Number"? Relative Quantity Judgments Through the Echolocation by Bottlenose Dolphins (Tursiops truncatus)

• Published in: Journal of comparative psychology (1983) 2024-11, Vol.138 (4), p.214-231
• Main Authors: Sakurai, Natsuko, Tomonaga, Masaki
• Format: Article
• Language: English
• Subjects: Animal; Discrimination; Dolphins; Dolphins & porpoises; Echolocation; Female; Judgment; Size Discrimination; Visual Discrimination
• ISSN: 0735-7036; 1939-2087
• DOI: 10.1037/com0000379

Dolphins are known to recognize their environment through echolocation. Previous studies have reported that they can discriminate the shape, size, thickness, and even material of objects through echolocation. However, little is known about the discrimination of quantities other than size and thickness (e.g., the number of objects). It is also unclear whether Weber's law (i.e., ratio dependency) holds for quantity discrimination through echolocation. In this study, we examined relative quantity judgments of visually occluded objects presented underwater by bottlenose dolphins. We found that they could discriminate pairs of same-sized objects ranging from one to eight, with performance improving as the difference ratio between the two numbers increased. In addition, their performance also improved as the magnitude of the number of objects involved increased. An additional test revealed that the accuracy of discrimination through echolocation was comparable to that of visual relative quantity judgments of the objects presented above water. On the other hand, under the condition that the overall size of each object (i.e., the sum of areas) was incongruent with the number of objects, performance was lower than when number and size were covarying. However, even within the incongruent condition, the effect of the number ratio was still observed, suggesting that the dolphins might have used various types of quantity information, such as number and size, flexibly to solve the task.