In Search of Dolphin Language

这个项目将解决海豚交流研究的核心问题，通过积极攻击的关键技术问题，如国家的最先进的计算神经科学和统计物理方法的归因问题。该项目将把目前依赖于实验室的定量高通量研究转移到野生动物的实地研究中。这项跨学科研究是动物认知心理学家Diana Reiss和物理学家和计算神经科学家Marcelo Magnasco实验室之间的合作。该项目的更广泛的影响之一，水族馆的研究是特别有利于推广工作，因为海豚相关的活动发生在一个开放的圆形剧场环境和展览已从海豚表演改变为更多的教育示范动物护理，行为和保护。研究活动将与公众参观和学童实地考察同时进行，因此，研究奋进将真实的及时向公众通报。几乎所有拟议的活动都可以在巴尔的摩的国家水族馆以适度的努力和成本进行公开展览，向来访的学童介绍研究过程和跨科学界限的合作研究。到研究地点的实地考察是与亨特学院学生的实地研究本科生和研究生课程联合组织的，是向这些学生展示和参与实际前沿研究的绝佳机会。海豚的认知和沟通能力是传奇的。将这些传说整理成一个严谨的科学体系是一个缓慢的过程，充满了许多陷阱;过去20年的严谨工作描绘了一幅比传说更微妙的画面。虽然海豚确实有惊人的认知能力，但它们在野外的自然同种交流仍然是个谜，关于它们声音库中许多元素的性质和它们整体交流的复杂性一直存在争议。关键的技术问题是归属问题的费力性，哪种动物发出哪种声音的分配，缺乏自动化的行为分析方法，以及最终将归因的声音与特定行为联系起来。因为我们目前不能自动三角测量和跟踪他们的声音水下没有现存的语料库海豚发声：什么已经研究了大多是孤立的呼叫，而不是“对话”。在过去的十年中，对鸣禽和啮齿动物的研究已经证明了高通量设置的力量，其中通过自动化手段研究了大量动物。该项目的总体目标是将这些高通量设置扩展到海豚通信研究，在圈养和野生环境中，并为这个更困难的情况开发相关的自动化音频和视频分析工具，以处理产生的大量数据。有两个具体的活动：首先，PI将学习和自由使用合成语言，并从多个Vantage位置进行第二次记录，然后计算分析野生海豚的自然行为，包括在豆荚中的自然行为以及在高度限制的特定行为中，如bowriding。将通过计算分析所产生的发声语料库，以确定野生海豚是否确实拥有足够丰富的“语言”，而不是一系列的叫声。

This project will address central questions in dolphin communication research by aggressively attacking the key technical issues such as the attribution problem with state-of-the-art computational neuroscience and statistical physics methods. The project will move quantitative high-throughput studies, currently tied to the bench, into field research of wild animals. This interdisciplinary study is collaboration between the labs of animal cognitive psychologist Diana Reiss and physicist and computational neuroscientist Marcelo Magnasco. One of the broader impacts of the project, the aquarium studies are particularly conducive to outreach efforts since the dolphin related activities take place in an open amphitheater environment and the exhibit has changed from dolphin shows to more educational demonstrations about animal care, behavior, and conservation. The research activities will take place concurrently with visits of the public and field trips of schoolchildren and therefore, the research endeavor is being communicated to the public in real time. Virtually all the activities proposed can, with modest effort and cost, be made into an open exhibit at the National Aquarium in Baltimore, instructing visiting schoolchildren on the research process and on collaborative research across scientific boundaries. The field trips to the research sites are organized jointly with undergraduate and graduate courses in field research for Hunter College students and are excellent opportunities to showcase and engage actual cutting edge research to these students.The cognitive and communication capabilities of dolphins are legendary. Untangling the legends into a body of rigorous science has been a slow process fraught with many pitfalls; rigorous work in the last two decades has painted a rather more nuanced picture than the legends. While dolphins do indeed have amazing cognitive abilities, their natural conspecific communication in the wild remains enigmatic, with ongoing debates as to the nature of many elements of their vocal repertoire and the complexity of their communication overall. The key technical problems have been the laboriousness of the attribution problem, the assignment of which animal emitted which vocalization, the lack of automated behavior analysis methods, and finally the linking of attributed vocalizations to specific behaviors. Because we currently cannot automatically triangulate and track their voices underwater there are no extant corpora of dolphin vocalizations: what have been studied are mostly isolated calls, as opposed to "conversations". In the last decade, studies in songbirds and rodents have demonstrated the power of high-throughput setups in which a large number of animals are studied through automated means. The overarching aim of this project is to extend these high-throughput settings to dolphin communication studies, in captivity and in the wild, and develop, for this far more difficult case, the relevant automated audio and video analysis tools to handle the huge amount of data generated. There are two specific activities: first, the PIs will study learning and free use of a synthetic language and second record from multiple vantage points and then computationally analyze natural dolphin behavior in the wild, both during natural behavior in pods as well as during highly circumscribed, specific behaviors such as bowriding. The corpora of vocalizations generated will be analyzed computationally to establish whether wild dolphins do have a rich-enough "language", as opposed to a repertoire of calls.