Behavioral Methodology in Echolocation by Marine Mammals

Despite the fact that a preponderance of the investigations dealing with echolocation by marine mammals has been done with intact animals performing some characteristic behavior, only a single paper written some fifteen years ago (Turner, 1964) has ever dealt in any profound way with problems of behavioral methodology. The 1964 paper by R. N. Turner addressed itself primarily to conditioned responses and included response measures, techniques of target or signal presentation, threshold measurement and reinforcement contingencies. When Turner’s paper was published, there had only been a few pioneering studies done on porpoise echolocation and hearing, and by today’s standards, these studies were, for the most part, relatively unsophisticated. A recent Russian publication (Lekomtsev and Titov, 1974) attempted to update Turner’s work, but in reality the paper served primarily to highlight Russian behavioral procedures to the study of porpoise sonar abilites.