Abstract
Since its emergence in the 1970s, animal cognition has expanded the topics and diversity of species under investigation (Healy, 2019; Shettleworth, 2001). Due to their high cognitive capabilities, dolphins have become a prominent focus of cognition studies (Johnson & Herzing, 2006). Key findings suggest that dolphins are self-aware (Reiss & Marino, 2001), have exceptional memory (Herman, 2010), and have high capabilities for kin recognition (Sayignet et al., 1999). One area that is increasingly being studied is creativity, as it indicates cognitive complexity and has an adaptive function that allows individuals to accommodate better novel stimuli (Hill et al., 2022). To overcome some of the challenges of studying dolphins, it is common to train concept behaviors for cognition studies, as seen in many creativity studies. The ‘creative’ behavior investigated in this study was a variation of the ‘vary’ behavior where the animal needed to produce a non-specific behavior, which may be from their learned repertoire or not, that did not repeat a previously performed behavior from that session to meet criteria (Kuczaj & Eskelinen, 2014b). The purpose of this study was to assess changes in creativity in dolphins when performing ‘vary’ behaviors with an extended time before bridging. Results indicated that longer delays before bridging increased creativity in behaviors, particularly elaboration or the complexity of a behavior (Kaufman & Kaufman, 2004). This is due to the additional time encouraging the use of more complex behaviors, as they are not preemptively terminated. The findings suggest that changes in bridge timing may be used to enhance the positive welfare effects of training cognitive behaviors as enrichment. Along with increasing sample size and number of trials, future studies should also analyze originality and longer delays before bridging to better understand the effects of bridge timing on creativity.