Bottlenose dolphins can understand their partner's role in a cooperative task.

ABSTRACT: In recent decades, a number of studies have examined whether various non-human animals understand their partner's role in cooperative situations. Yet the relatively tolerant timing requirements of these tasks make it theoretically possible for animals to succeed by using simple behavioural strategies rather than by jointly intended coordination. Here we investigated whether bottlenose dolphins could understand a cooperative partner's role by testing whether they could learn a button-pressing task requiring precise behavioural synchronization. Specifically, members of cooperative dyads were required to swim across a lagoon and each press their own underwater button simultaneously (within a 1 s time window), whether sent together or with a delay between partners of 1-20 s. We found that dolp

SUBMITTER: Jaakkola K 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC6170804 | biostudies-literature | 2018 Sep

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature