What's the Point?  
By:Allie Proskovec; Director of Media and Marketing

The study, titled "Imitate That One: Dolphins Spontaneously Interpret Human Pointing Gesture in a Novel Context," was published in the journal Animal Cognition by Dolphin Research Center (DRC) researchers Hannah Salomons, Ph.D., Emily Guarino, and Kelly Jaakkola, Ph.D.

Scientists already knew that dolphins are among the relatively few non-human animals capable of following a human point. But there has been an important question behind that ability: Do dolphins actually understand the communicative meaning of pointing, or have they simply learned that a point is a trained cue connected to a particular behavior?

To investigate, the research team created a new variation of a familiar "do-as-I-do" imitation game. One dolphin was positioned between two other dolphins, who were each executing different behaviors at the same time, such as spinning, tail slapping, or waving. The trainer then gave the signal to imitate while pointing toward one of the two dolphins.

What made the experiment especially interesting was that the pointing gesture had never been used in this way before. Rather than meaning "go there" or signaling a particular behavior, the point communicated which dolphin the subject should imitate.

All three dolphins participating in the study successfully interpreted the gesture. They consistently imitated the dolphin being pointed to more often than would be expected by chance. Even more interestingly, their performance did not improve over time. This suggests that they weren't simply learning through trial and error during the experiment. Instead, they appeared to understand the meaning of the gesture from the beginning.

"This finding suggests dolphins interpret pointing similarly to humans, as a flexible form of communication that can provide information in different contexts," said Hannah Salomons, a post-doctoral researcher at Dolphin Research Center. The dolphins responded to the same gesture with different behaviors depending on the situation, demonstrating an impressive level of cognitive flexibility.

The findings add to growing evidence that dolphins possess advanced social cognition and may understand communicative intent in ways that are relatively rare among animals. Researchers suggest these abilities could be connected to dolphins' complex social lives, sophisticated communication systems, and possible forms of distal referencing through echolocation. Distal referencing is the ability to communicate information about something that is not immediately present or within direct view. For dolphins, this may mean using echolocation to gather and potentially communicate information about objects or individuals at a distance, offering another possible example of how they can share information about the world around them. 

For Dolphin Research Center, research like this gives us another opportunity to learn from the dolphins themselves. A simple gesture that seems completely ordinary to us can provide scientists with valuable insight into how another species understands information, interprets communication, and responds to the social world around them.

And as Dr. Kelly Jaakkola, DRC's Director of Research, noted, the findings raise even bigger questions about what kinds of social environments humans may share with dogs and dolphins, but not with our much closer relatives, chimpanzees, that may have favored the evolution of cooperative communication.

There is still much to learn, but every study brings us a little closer to understanding the remarkable minds of dolphins and the many ways they communicate with the world around them.