Responses to Familiar and Unfamiliar Humans by Belugas (Delphinapterus leucas), Bottlenose Dolphins (Tursiops truncatus), & Pacific White-Sided Dolphins (Lagenorhynchus obliquidens): A Replication and Extension
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Previous research has documented that cetaceans can discriminate between humans, but the process used to categorize humans still remains unclear. The goal of the present study was to replicate and extend previous work on the discrimination between familiar and unfamiliar humans by three species of cetaceans. The current study manipulated the familiarity and activity level of humans presented to 12 belugas (Delphinapterus leucas) housed between two facilities, five bottlenose dolphins (Tursiops truncatus), and six Pacific white-sided dolphins (Lagenorhynchus obliquidens) during free-swim conditions. Two measures of discrimination were coded from video recordings of each trial: lateralized visual processing and gaze duration. No clear lateralization effects emerged at the species level, primarily due to extensive individual variability. The results also indicated that activity level influenced gaze durations across species, and for some individuals, the interaction between human familiarity and activity level influenced gaze durations and eye preferences. Unexpectedly, bottlenose dolphins had longer gaze durations for familiar humans whereas belugas and Pacific white-sided dolphins had longer gaze durations for unfamiliar humans. All three groups displayed longer gaze durations for active humans as compared to neutral humans, and belugas and bottlenose dolphins had significantly longer gaze durations than Pacific white-sided dolphins. These results indicate that the cetaceans can discriminate between unfamiliar and familiar humans and preferred active humans. However, discrimination of humans via lateralized visual processing did not appear at the group level, but rather at the individual level which countered previous research. This study is discussed within the contexts of attention and individual differences across animals of different species.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.003 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".