Heather Hill
St Marys Universty, Psychology, Faculty Member
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On April 14th, 2016, Animal Behavior and Cognition lost its Editor-in-Chief. But the scientific community and the friends and colleagues of Stanley ‘Stan’ Kuczaj III lost so much more. As many know, Stan began his career in Developmental... more
On April 14th, 2016, Animal Behavior and Cognition lost its Editor-in-Chief. But the scientific community and the friends and colleagues of Stanley ‘Stan’ Kuczaj III lost so much more. As many know, Stan began his career in Developmental Psychology, making enormous contributions in the area of language development, but became best known for his many innovative contributions in the area of marine mammal behavior. Stan founded Animal Behavior and Cognition because he was deeply passionate about research with a broad range of topics concerning animal behavior, animal cognition, and animal welfare. He was equally passionate about the idea that science should be accessible to all, and that accessibility should not come at a financial burden to researchers. The current editorial team is committed to carrying on Stan’s vision for the journal, and we believe that its continuation will pay homage to Stan as a researcher, and as a leader within the scientific community. However, for the next ...
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Thinking flexibly is a skill that enables animals to adapt to changing environments, which enhances survival. Killer whales,Orcinus orca, as the ocean apex predator display a number of complex cognitive abilities, especially flexible... more
Thinking flexibly is a skill that enables animals to adapt to changing environments, which enhances survival. Killer whales,Orcinus orca, as the ocean apex predator display a number of complex cognitive abilities, especially flexible thinking or creativity when it comes to foraging. In human care, smaller dolphins and other marine mammals have been trained to think creatively while under stimulus control. The results of these previous studies have demonstrated that bottlenose dolphins,Tursiops truncatus, can create original behaviors in response to an innovative cue. We trained and tested a total of nine killer whales from two different facilities on the innovate concept, using the same methodology. The killer whales ranged in age from 5 to 29 yrs with 4 females and 5 males. The results indicate that the killer whales demonstrated high fluency, originality, some elaboration, and flexibility in their behaviors. Individual variability was observed with younger animals demonstrating mo...
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Cetaceans are potentially at risk of poor welfare due to the animals’ natural reliance on sound and the persistent nature of anthropogenic noise, especially in the wild. Industrial, commercial, and recreational human activity has expanded... more
Cetaceans are potentially at risk of poor welfare due to the animals’ natural reliance on sound and the persistent nature of anthropogenic noise, especially in the wild. Industrial, commercial, and recreational human activity has expanded across the seas, resulting in a propagation of sound with varying frequency characteristics. In many countries, current regulations are based on the potential to induce hearing loss; however, a more nuanced approach is needed when shaping regulations, due to other non-hearing loss effects including activation of the stress response, acoustic masking, frequency shifts, alterations in behavior, and decreased foraging. Cetaceans in managed-care settings share the same acoustic characteristics as their wild counterparts, but face different environmental parameters. There have been steps to integrate work on welfare in the wild and in managed-care contexts, and the domain of acoustics offers the opportunity to inform and connect information from both ma...
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The frequency and nature of allocare by a group of belugas (Delphinapterus leucas) in human care Permalink https://escholarship.org/uc/item/4pr8386p
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The purpose of this special issue is to highlight the publication trends regarding research in today’s field of comparative psychology. A survey was conducted to determine the research priorities of institutions and researchers currently... more
The purpose of this special issue is to highlight the publication trends regarding research in today’s field of comparative psychology. A survey was conducted to determine the research priorities of institutions and researchers currently pursuing research with animals. Over 200 responses were received from 28 different countries representing scientists from many different backgrounds and institutions. Top priorities for research interests were clearly divided by the setting in which scientists conducted their research with animals. Experts from the fields identified as the most important future research topics on comparative psychology were invited to review their respective fields for publication trends over the last 20 years. The results of their significant efforts and the importance of continuing research in comparative psychology are presented and addressed in this special issue. We hope that this information will not only guide research within these fields but also identify po...
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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... more
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 famil...
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Author(s): Hill, Heather M.; Dietrich, Sarah; Cadena, Alicia; Raymond, Jenny; Cheves, Kyle | Abstract: Critical to advanced social intelligence is the ability to take into consideration the thoughts and feelings of others, a skill... more
Author(s): Hill, Heather M.; Dietrich, Sarah; Cadena, Alicia; Raymond, Jenny; Cheves, Kyle | Abstract: Critical to advanced social intelligence is the ability to take into consideration the thoughts and feelings of others, a skill referred to as Theory of Mind (ToM) or mindreading. In this article, we present a critical review of the comparative methodology and utility of the nonverbal FBT along with a description of an attempted FBT replication conducted with a bottlenose dolphin prior to the implementation of the more successful approaches used currently. Attempting to replicate Tschudin’s (2001, 2006) methodology with dolphins highlighted several flaws that may explain the failures of socially complex mammals to display competency: (1) reliance on a containment invisible displacement procedure that is difficult for non-human animals and especially dolphins to follow, (2) a complex procedure which demands extensive training time, (3) a long trial duration with several moving parts...
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This paper is an introduction to the first part of a double special issue inspired by the work of and dedicated to Dr. Stan Kuczaj, who passed away in April 2016. The introduction reflects the contents of the first part of the special... more
This paper is an introduction to the first part of a double special issue inspired by the work of and dedicated to Dr. Stan Kuczaj, who passed away in April 2016. The introduction reflects the contents of the first part of the special issue, which included a number of different species, research designs, and questions. Comments regarding Stan's influence on each contributer are also shared.
Author(s): Hill, Heather M.; Campbell, Carolyn | Abstract: The care of offspring by non-parental caregivers, or allocare, is common across many taxa. Several functions of allocare have been proposed, including opportunities to rest or... more
Author(s): Hill, Heather M.; Campbell, Carolyn | Abstract: The care of offspring by non-parental caregivers, or allocare, is common across many taxa. Several functions of allocare have been proposed, including opportunities to rest or forage for the mother, experiences to learn about caring for young animals for naive females, or additional nourishment and protection for the offspring. Belugas, like many cetaceans, display allocare. However, the frequency and contexts in which allocare occurs have not been studied extensively. The purpose of the current study was to document the frequency of allocare in a group of belugas in human care that steadily increased in its number of offspring over a period of four years. The results suggested that allocare did not occur as frequently as mother-calf swims and occurred when adult females without calves were available in the social grouping. Additionally, certain allocare partners seemed to be preferred by specific mother-calf pairs. The resu...
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This study aimed to expand on previous efforts to evaluate the ontogeny of echolocation in Atlantic bottlenose dolphins (Tursiops truncatus). Data consisted of echolocation recordings and concurrent behavioral observations taken from one... more
This study aimed to expand on previous efforts to evaluate the ontogeny of echolocation in Atlantic bottlenose dolphins (Tursiops truncatus). Data consisted of echolocation recordings and concurrent behavioral observations taken from one calf in 2000 and from five additional dolphin calves and their mothers in 2002 housed at the U.S. Naval facility in San Diego, CA. A total of 361 echolocation click train samples from calves were recorded weekly over the first 6 months of the calves’ lives. The earliest calf echolocation train was recorded at 22 days postpartum and the number of echolocation attempts from calves increased steadily with age. Calf echolocation trains increased in duration and the number of clicks per train with age while train density (clicks/sec) and interclick interval values remained more consistent. Calves swimming independent of their mothers produced more click trains, especially when multiple calves were present in the social grouping. When considering these re...
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Author(s): Hill, Heather M.; Webber, Krista; Kemery, Alicia; Garcia, Melissa; Kuczaj, II, Stan A | Abstract: Although California sea lions (Zalophus californianus) are capable of forming complex mental concepts, they have failed to... more
Author(s): Hill, Heather M.; Webber, Krista; Kemery, Alicia; Garcia, Melissa; Kuczaj, II, Stan A | Abstract: Although California sea lions (Zalophus californianus) are capable of forming complex mental concepts, they have failed to demonstrate mirror self-recognition, a skill that requires both a mental representation of one’s physical features and knowledge of a reflective surface. Many non-human species that do not recognize themselves in mirrors can nonetheless learn to use mirror reflections to locate and retrieve objects. A total of 7 sea lions housed at 2 separate facilities were tested on their ability to detect an object using a mirror. The results of a preliminary detection task in which sea lions were reinforced for looking at a mirror to locate an object suggested that 4 sea lions reliably learned to locate an object positioned below a mirror in one of three locations. A follow-up study was conducted to determine if 3 different sea lions could learn the task without train...
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Wassermann et al. (2018, https://doi.org/10.7717/peerj.5953) argued that previous public opinion research about marine mammal attractions should be considered unreliable due to possible biases in study design, which may have influenced... more
Wassermann et al. (2018, https://doi.org/10.7717/peerj.5953) argued that previous public opinion research about marine mammal attractions should be considered unreliable due to possible biases in study design, which may have influenced participants’ responses. As in all scientific endeavors, reducing bias in order to gather more objective, evidence-based information is a worthy and commendable goal. Unfortunately, Wassermann et al. fell short in their efforts to produce an unbiased investigation into the beliefs of the general public about captive marine mammal attractions, due to a number of methodological flaws and biases in their own study. Specific concerns include a non-representative sample, methodological issues with data collection and coding procedures, a lack of reliability between data published and data provided, a failure to demonstrate inter-coder reliability, a failure to control for sequence effects in quantitative data, misrepresentation of databetween text and tabl...
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Across the animal kingdom, immature animals are characterized by their playfulness and diversity of behavior, but are their actions enriching to adult conspecifics? The purpose of this study was to assess if beluga (Delphinapterus leucas)... more
Across the animal kingdom, immature animals are characterized by their playfulness and diversity of behavior, but are their actions enriching to adult conspecifics? The purpose of this study was to assess if beluga (Delphinapterus leucas) calves influenced the behavioral repertoire of adult conspecifics, specifically with regard to play behaviors, social interactions, and solitary swimming. Video recordings made between 2012 and 2015 (200+ hrs) were randomly selected using the following social groupings: adults only (n = 13), adults with juvenile (n = 28), mother-calf pairs (n = 24), mother-calf pairs with juvenile (n = 26), and mixed groups (n = 84) that included different ages and sexes. Each recording was coded using a 1-min instantaneous sampling method for 7 behavioral categories that were grouped into 4 major categories: mother-calf swim, social interactions, play, and solitary swims. Results indicated that the social grouping influenced the behavioral categories even when num...
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Lateralization of cognitive processes and motor functions has been demonstrated in a number of species, including humans, elephants, and cetaceans. For example, bottlenose dolphins (Tursiops truncatus) have exhibited preferential eye use... more
Lateralization of cognitive processes and motor functions has been demonstrated in a number of species, including humans, elephants, and cetaceans. For example, bottlenose dolphins (Tursiops truncatus) have exhibited preferential eye use during a variety of cognitive tasks. The present study investigated the possibility of visual lateralization in 12 belugas (Delphinapterus leucas) and six Pacific white-sided dolphins (Lagenorhynchus obliquidens) located at two separate marine mammal facilities. During free swim periods, the belugas and Pacific white-sided dolphins were presented a familiar human, an unfamiliar human, or no human during 10-15 min sessions. Session videos were coded for gaze duration, eye presentation at approach, and eye preference while viewing each stimulus. Although we did not find any clear group level lateralization, we found individual left eye lateralized preferences related to social stimuli for most belugas and some Pacific white-sided dolphins. Differences...
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Awareness of the self and awareness of others are difficult faculties to define. Part of the problem lies in the wide range of abilities that involve various aspects of awareness. Some of the most commonly studied abilities focus on the... more
Awareness of the self and awareness of others are difficult faculties to define. Part of the problem lies in the wide range of abilities that involve various aspects of awareness. Some of the most commonly studied abilities focus on the self-awareness of the individual. These abilities ...