Bibliographic entry and link to Big 3

Morrison, Rachel, and Diana Reiss. “Precocious development of self-Awareness in dolphins.” Plos One,
vol. 13, no. 1, Oct. 2018.

Connor, Richard C., et al. “Synchrony, social behaviour and alliance affiliation in Indian Ocean bottlenose
dolphins, Tursiops aduncus.” Animal Behaviour, vol. 72, no. 6, 2006, pp. 1371–1378.

Pack, Adam A., and Louis M. Herman. “The dolphins (Tursiops truncatus) understanding of human gazing
and pointing: Knowing what and where.” Journal of Comparative Psychology, vol. 121, no. 1, 2007, pp.
34–45.

Introduction

A question always being asked today among people including you and me is that “Do you believe
animals have intelligence?” The answers are different with respect to different individuals. Hearing
about the cleverness of animals makes some people a little uncomfortable. Jennifer Vonk, a
comparative psychologist at Oakland University in Michigan said that people want to be special in the
world; However, primatologist Frans de Waal, a leader in the research of animal cognition field, suggests
it’s time we wipe our minds. Frans de Waal once said that, “Animal cognition is more like a bush. The
corvids [crows and ravens] branch in one direction, the dolphins in another, the primates, including us,
in another. You can’t put them on a simple scale, because all animals are very smart in what they need
to do to survive.” Chimps is one of the species that most people agree its intelligence and cognition. In
the year 2015, two researchers from Harvard, who are Alexandra Rosati and Felix Warneken decided to
test the chimps about a unique skill considered only could be done by humans, cooking. By offering the
chimpanzee two choices: one is to place the raw food in a device which will return them raw as before,
and the other would deliver cooked food. The result shows that the chimps favored the cooked food and
even they moved the raw food to the “oven”. Therefore, the experiment could prove that chimps are
intelligent although the skill of cooking of them cannot be compared to humans. Other than chimps,
cetaceans are another specie which behave cognitively. In Carl Safina’s book, Beyond Words: What
Animals Think and Feel, he introduces the level of communication of dolphins through a complicated
skill in understand language which is “syntax”. Safina defines syntax as the understanding that the order
of the words will change the meaning of a sentence. According to Herman, the captive dolphin
researcher, he discovered that dolphins could realize differences in the sentences in different
arrangements (Safina, 89). For example, Dolphins can understand the syntax of sign-language sentences
amounting to “Touch the Frisbee with your tail and then jump over it.” Dolphins understand enough to
ignore nonsense commands. They can learn several dozen human words and understand short
sentences. But dolphins’ real world and society are infinitely more demanding, dimensional, and high-
stakes than a pool with a human or two and a few toys (Safina, 313).

Toni Frohoff, a consultant, author, educator, and behavioral biologist researcher specializing in the
psychology and protection of dolphins, whales and other animals said that cetaceans (dolphins,
porpoises and whales) are an order of fully-aquatic mammals who have engrossed scientists and the
public alike with their large complex brains, impressive intelligence, and social and communicative
sophistication. The research of cetaceans has been started from approximately last century 70s and it is
still attracting plenty of organizations and researchers today. There are a huge number of researchers
put a lot of effort into this field but what I want to focus on is the cognition which is one of the hottest
topics related to cetaceans. Several remembering events contributed greatly to the progress in dolphin
research and I would like to mention them to give a brief introduction of how the researchers has
developed their ideas. In 1970, scientists proved that dolphins could retain memories of learned skills. In
1980, Herman discovered that they could maintain representation associated with recent events for Commented [1]: Good usage of names of scientists
minutes, which is a process often referred to as working memory. Moreover, Herman stated that it is and their works throughout the paragraphs
clear that memory formation and use are foundational to all cognitive processes of dolphins. Then in Commented [2]: _Marked as resolved_
1999, Mercado and Murray questioned about the semantic memories and episodic memory of dolphins Commented [3]: _Re-opened_
which is less known in that moment. Two years later, Lea started the research about which human Thanks!
actions can impact the psychological lives of dolphins. Today, more and more experiments and tests are
continuing to determine the dolphin cognition, including the most recent research by Racheal Morrison
which is about the self-awareness of dolphins. Besides, these excellent researchers, some animal
organization also pay attention the dolphins, including Sea Shepherd Conservation Society, Oceanic
Preservation Society and so on.

From the numerous sources shown above, we could have a brief preview of the cognition of dolphins.
Here comes the question that why these researches are important, or readers may want to ask it is
necessary to read these papers. By reading these paper, researchers provided lots of example to us
which will help understand the cognition of dolphins and we might find that animals are similar to
human being. They also have their social group, and family. Dolphins will protect their children and take
care of them. If the kids are taken away from the mom will also feel upset and be crazy. Right now,
protection of animals can always be seeing in different place, but people do not know why they
promote. By recognizing the cognition of animals, mankind may start to protect the animals around us
from their instinct which would definitely improve the planet we live, earth to a better place from the
protection of animals, environment and resources and more.
The graph presents the body weight with brain weigh.

Body

The first research paper I specially recommend is one of the latest papers by Rachel Morrison and Diana
Reiss, named Precocious development of self-awareness in dolphins. As the title of the paper, authors
put their attention on the self-awareness which is close to the topic I wish to share with audience,
cognition. Rachel Morrison and Diana Reiss are all from the Department of Psychology of famous
university and college. One is from The Graduate Center of The City University of New York and the
other is also from Hunter College of The City University. Moreover, this source has been elected by the
well-known scientific platform, PLOS ONE as a good source recommend for the cognition of dolphins.

The main problem two authors would like to solve through this research is to determine when the
young dolphins start to become self-awareness. The theory that the result depending on is the MSR
which stands for the Mirror-self recognition. MSR is an indicator of self-awareness and it have been
applied to different animals, including apes, elephants and dolphins which is the species authors prefer
to study. Actually, MSR testament has been demonstrated in adult dolphins already but this research is
the first time that apply it toward the young dolphins. Therefore, researchers follow the similar
strategies with the previous adult dolphin experiment.

For the method of this research, several sessions were applied in order to training and measuring the
two tested young dolphins. For example, the mark test session which makes dolphins exposed to the
mirror for approximately fifteen minutes is to training them. Then it comes the baseline session that
researchers tried to remove the mirror and determined how the dolphins would like to behave in
purpose to measure whether they are self-awareness or not. The total session of the experiment is 57
which and the result shows that one of them passed the test at an age of two years and seven months,
while the other passed five months earlier. At the end, authors declare that their results indicate that
self-directed behavior at mirror emerged in a dolphin at seven months of age, which is much earlier than
that of humans and chimpanzees.

This research is the latest research of the three papers I chosen for the topic, cognition of dolphins.
Therefore, to present the older researches, I would like to have my audience to be familiar with the
research result nowadays instead of the previous as some experiments before are limited by the
condition and technology. Although, in science we could not never consider a proof as a fact, the newest
technology does improve the accuracy of the experiment to become more credible. In the next paper I
found will focus more about the improvement of the previous research.

In 2006, Richard C. Connor who comes from Biology Department of University of Massachusetts
Dartmouth, with Rachel Smolker from University of Vermont Burlington and Lars Bejder from Dalhousie
University Halifax, finished the article “Synchrony, social behavior and alliance affiliation in Indian Ocean
bottlenose dolphins, Tursiops aduncus” which mainly discussed about how synchronous behavior takes
place when a group of dolphins swimming. Why synchrony is important? The reason is it can describe
occasions when group members perform behaviors that show nonrandom temporal clustering. And the
data authors taken from is the one being collected during 1987 to 1989 from 20 dolphins in Shark Bay.
Comparing to the essay above the data of this is out-of-date, and this may reflect the difference of the
achievement of the previous and current researches. Moreover, the focus on the relation between
synchrony and social behavior is another reason I pay attention to this paper. As authors stated in the
essay, all the synchs that tested from 1987 to 1989 samples were supposed to be ignored the fact of
socialization of dolphins. To be more precise, the petting which is the social action of dolphins have to
be concerned.

The method being applied is from several aspects, such as distance and stagger, time differences,
membership and social behavior. Besides the sample from 1980s, later authors mentioned that they
also added the 2004 samples into the result to determine the conclusion. As the new data has been
included, the result will have a section related to synchrony and social behavior which did not be
measured in the older samples. In the discussion section, authors also mentioned their discovery about
the degree of synchrony with related to the alliance behavior and declared that it is unique from other
mammals. However, researchers could only prove that synchronous surfacing might be an alliance signal
derives from variation in the phenomena. The experiment that did here could not determine the
hypothesis, so although these experts consider it is true they did not have enough evidence to
demonstrate their thoughts.

As I have introduced, this paper is unique, and it perfectly reflects what we want to talk about in the
historical review of researches. In fact, researches become accurate and credible. From this research, I
agree with what author did. Researcher can borrow the data and result from the previous measurement
that others have done to save time and cost, but new research may determine and cover some other
factors may have effects on the result, or it is better to say variables of the experiments to improve the
previous findings.

The last research paper I prefer to mention is “The Dolphin’s (Tursiops truncates) Understanding of
Human Gazing and Pointing: Knowing What and Where by Adam A. Pack from the dolphin institute of
University of Hawaii at Manoa and Louis M. Herman from Kewalo Basin Marine Mammal Laboratory.
Although this is not latest and one of the author Herman has already left us, but I still want to give
specially thanks to him due to his great contribution in dolphin researches. He used to be a professor of
University of Hawaii and then founded the Kewalo Basin Marine Mammal Laboratory in Honolulu,
Hawaii to study bottlenose dolphins. Later in 1993, he also founded a non-profit corporation named The
Dolphin Institute which aims to dedicate into to the education research and conversation. Herman
served as a member of the Sanctuary Advisory Council for the Hawaiian Islands Humpback Whale
National Marine Sanctuary. In total, he has published over 120 scientific papers.

In this article, authors aim to test the understanding of dolphins of human pointing and head-gazing
which are two main types of joint attention, a form of social cognition. In the introduction, Herman
states that in 1980 he has an early discussion of diverse species on cognitive traits. Then in 1999 Herman
and his colleagues first experiment that dolphins understand the indicative pointing. Therefore, this
research is based the previous research result of Herman. To be different from the one authors have
already done, they designed three experiments for this research. One is to identity whether dolphins
could find the item by pointing of human; moreover, another is a step beyond the first one. This is to
test the ability of dolphins process symbolic instructions indicated by people’s head gazing. The last one
is the most developed which tries to investigate the understanding of geometry of human indicative
cues. The method part of this paper is much easier to be realized than most of scientific articles as the
provides a visual component in this section. The result reflects that one of the two dolphins being tested
had no difficulty in selecting the sample object which is indicated by the experimenter. However, for the
other two, authors state that further research would be necessary to examine the reliability of their
hypothesis.

The reason why I pick this paper from numerous research respecting to dolphins is because this one is
good instance for reviewing of author’s own previous studies and develop another idea different from
he or she has not thought before. In addition, the authors of this research are quite famous in the field
of the research of dolphins, as they have spent most of time study the cognition of dolphins.
The Figure in research of Pack and Herman use to give the audience a view of how their experiment
testing the joint attention of dolphins.