Discrimination of amplitude-modulated synthetic echo trains by an echolocating bottlenose dolphin

Bottlenose dolphins (Tursiops truncatus) have an acute ability to use target echoes to judge attributes such as size, shape, and material composition. Most target recognition studies have focused on features associated with individual echoes as opposed to information conveyed across echo sequences (feature envelope of the multi-echo train). One feature of aspect-dependent targets is an amplitude modulation (AM) across the return echoes in the echo train created by relative movement of the target and dolphin. The current study examined whether dolphins could discriminate targets with different AM envelopes. "Electronic echoes" triggered by a dolphin's outgoing echolocation clicks were manipulated to create sinusoidal envelopes with varying AM rate and depth. Echo trains were equated for energy, requiring the dolphin to extract and retain information from multiple echoes in order to detect and report the presence of AM. The dolphin discriminated amplitude-modulated echo trains from those that were not modulated. AM depth thresholds were approximately 0.8 dB, similar to other published amplitude limens. Decreasing the rate of modulation from approximately 16 to 2 cycles per second did not affect the dolphin's AM depth sensitivity. The results support multiple-echo processing in bottlenose dolphin echolocation. This capability provides additional theoretical justification for exploring synthetic aperture sonar concepts in models of animal echolocation that potentially support theories postulating formation of images as an ultimate means for target identification.