EXPERIMENTAL PSYCHOLOGY
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Experimental Psychology Club
About the Club
The Experimental Psychology Club (EPC) is designed to support the education and development of students of Experimental Psychology at the University of Nevada. The club invites speakers who are well-known researchers or professors in Experimental Psychology to present new and advanced information. The club promotes interaction among students and communication between students and faculty.
All graduate students in Experimental Psychology at UNR are automatically members of the EPC. Any undergraduates who are interested in membership are welcome to join by attending our meetings. Our colloquia are available for anyone to attend.
The executive board is elected at the start of the Spring semester. The current EPC officers are:
President - Roxanne Upah
Vice-President - Susie Nugent
Treasurer - Carrie Paras
Secretary - Michael Fry
Feel free to contact us with comments or suggestions about upcoming EPC events.
Current Events
Professor Laela Sayigh will be speaking next Friday (the 14th) at 3:30 p.m. in the education building, room 2006. Attached is the abstract for her talk. Reception to follow at the Gardner ranch.
Bottlenose dolphin communication: fact and fiction
Laela S. Sayigh
Associate Professor
University of North Carolina at Wilmington
The topic of bottlenose dolphin communication has long been prone to sensationalism, starting with John Lilly´s work in the 1960´s on dolphin "language", which was largely unproductive. I will give a brief historical overview of the study of dolphin communication, and will then focus on one particular vocalization, the individually distinctive signature whistle. A large body of data from captive and field studies supports the idea that bottlenose dolphins (Tursiops truncatus) produce individually distinctive signature whistles. Recent studies have indicated that dolphins use these whistles for individual recognition and for maintaining group cohesion. Dolphins also imitate one another´s signature whistles, although the function of such imitations is not yet known.
Despite solid evidence for signature whistles, a recent study returned to John Lilly´s idea that dolphins possess a whistle repertoire that may have language-like functions. This study ("The fallacy of signature whistles"; McCowan and Reiss, Animal Behavior, Dec 2001), also claimed that studies of signature whistles had been biased by researchers selecting only similar-looking whistles from a given dolphin for analyses. McCowan and Reiss further claimed that visual classification of spectrograms (the technique used by most researchers) was not as reliable a method for whistle classification as their computerized technique (the McCowan method). In order to test their claims, we randomly selected 20 whistles from each of 20 dolphins that were recorded during brief capture-release events in Sarasota, Florida. Each whistle spectrogram was photocopied four times, and the resulting 1,600 whistles were divided into 64 packets of 25 whistles (five from each of five dolphins). Naïve judges were asked to visually group the whistles according to their overall contours, with no instruction as to how many dolphins´ whistles were present. Judges were significantly more likely to group together a dolphin´s own whistles (mean = 4.27 out of 5 possible), than whistles of different dolphins (mean = 0.21 out of 20 possible; p < 0.0001, paired t-test). In addition, these same randomly selected whistles were analyzed using the McCowan method, which was found to be inferior to visual classification when multi-looped whistles were being compared. Human observers were more likely to create externally validated categories of whistles (those produced by the same dolphin) than was the McCowan method. This study provides strong evidence that dolphins do produce individually distinctive signature whistles, and validates the use of visual classification of whistles. Possible explanations for the discrepancies between studies that have reported signature whistles and the McCowan and Reiss (2001) study will be discussed.
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