Cognitive Psychology Commons^™

Can Dolphins Cooperate To Solve A Novel Task?, Kelley Ann Winship

Master's Theses

Bottlenose dolphins cooperate in a variety of contexts, including foraging,acquiring mates, playing, and assisting distressed conspecifics. To better understand the capacity for cooperative behaviors, animals are often given tasks that require pairs of animals to coordinate their actions in order to receive a reward. This paper reports the results of an aquatic version of one such task: cooperative rope-pulling. Three groups of captive bottlenose dolphins (Tursiops truncatus) were given an apparatus that could most easily be opened by the two animals working together. Two untrained adult males at one location were successful in opening the apparatus together, sharing …