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Science 4 February 1977:
Vol. 195. no. 4277, pp. 501 - 503
DOI: 10.1126/science.835012
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Articles

Science, Vol 195, Issue 4277, 501-503
Copyright © 1977 by American Association for the Advancement of Science

articles

Memory for lists of sounds by the bottle-nosed dolphin: convergence of memory processes with humans?

RK Thompson and LM Herman

After listening to a list of as many as six discriminably different 2-second sounds, a bottle-nosed dolphin classified a subsequent probe sound as either "old" (from the list) or "new." The probability of recognizing an old probe was close to 1.0 if it matched the most recent sound in the list and decreased sigmoidally for successively earlier list sounds. Memory span was estimated to be at least four sounds. Overall probabilities of correctly classifying old and new probes corresponded closely, as if recognition decisions were made according to an optimum maximum likelihood criterion. The data bore many similarities to data obtained from humans tested on probe recognition tasks.


THIS ARTICLE HAS BEEN CITED BY OTHER ARTICLES:
Effects of Age on Measures of Complex Working Memory Span in the Beagle Dog (Canis familiaris) Using Two Versions of a Spatial List Learning Paradigm.
P. D. Tapp, C. T. Siwak, J. Estrada, D. Holowachuk, and N. W. Milgram (2003)
Learn. Mem. 10, 148-160
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Primate memory: retention of serial list items by a rhesus monkey.
S. Sands and A. Wright (1980)
Science 209, 938-940
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