Slide 10 of 21
Notes:
Attempts to characterize what information dolphins receive and how they represent it present special challenges to cognitive science
Because the dolphin's echolocation system is so different from our own, we can examine questions about the nature of perceptual representations. Vision is such a primary sense for us, that we tend to conceive of representations in vision-like terms and to think of vision as being somehow more primary than other senses. The information a dolphin gets through echolocation is nearly as complex as the information we receive through vision—object structure and material composition—but it comes through a very different sensory modality. This raises the possibility that dolphins have images of the objects they echolocate, but these images are unlikely to use the same brain mechanisms or processes as visual images. By understanding dolphin images or whatever representations they use to maintain information about echolocated objects in their environment we should be able to gain powerful insights into the nature of these cognitive systems and our own.
Because the dolphin uses distinct clicks to sense the properties of objects that it echolocates, each echo returns a discrete packet of information about the object. The distribution of clicks can be used as an indicator of the animal's attention.
Dolphin and object may move between clicks. The dolphin must integrate information despite this variation.
