Louis Herman

Louis Herman (April 16, 1930 – August 3, 2016) was an American marine biologist. He was a researcher of dolphin sensory abilities, dolphin cognition, and humpback whales. He was professor in the Department of Psychology and a cooperating faculty member of the Department of Oceanography at the University of Hawaii at Manoa. He founded the Kewalo Basin Marine Mammal Laboratory (KBMML) in Honolulu, Hawaii in 1970 to study bottlenose dolphin perception, cognition, and communication. In 1975, he pioneered the scientific study of the annual winter migration of humpback whales into Hawaiian waters. Together with Adam Pack, he founded The Dolphin Institute in 1993, a non-profit corporation dedicated to dolphins and whales through education, research, and conservation.

Herman served as a member of the Sanctuary Advisory Council for the Hawaiian Islands Humpback Whale National Marine Sanctuary. In total, he has published over 120 scientific papers.

Herman is most known for his research into sensory perception, animal language and echolocation, and more recently on the topic of imitation. The Atlantic bottlenosed dolphins involved in the research programs were Pua, Kea, Akeakamai, Phoenix, Elele, and Hiapo. Akeakamai is perhaps the best-known of the "language" dolphins, and was inserted as a character in David Brin's science fiction novel Startide Rising. In the Hawaiian language, Akeakamai roughly corresponds to: lover (ake) of wisdom ().

His 1984 paper on animal language (Herman, Richards, and Wolz, 1984) was published in the human psychology journal Cognition, during the anti-animal language backlash generated by the skeptical critique of primate animal language programs by Herbert Terrace in 1979. The key difference with previous primate work was that the dolphin work focused on language comprehension only. The problem with researching language production was the issue of scientific parsimony: it is essentially impossible to verify that an animal truly understands its own artificial language production. This problem is eliminated with language comprehension studies, because the researchers control the form of the artificial language, and need only observe the behavior of the animal in response to the symbol sequence. Other controls included the use of a blinded observer who was not aware of the sentence given to the dolphin, as well as the balanced presentation of possible word/symbol combinations. Most importantly, the dolphins were tested on their responses to novel sentences they had never before been given, to test for concept generalization. Also, the dolphins were tested in novel sentence grammars and anomalous grammars as well, demonstrating that the dolphins' comprehension was not limited to a finite-state (slot-based) syntax.

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