In the task, the elephants were to simply remove the lid off a bucket to earn the bait inside, but some elephants still removed the lid when the lid was placed on the ground therefore unrelated to the goal of obtaining the bait inside the bucket. However, Nissani ( 2006) recently reported the poor performance of elephants when given a causal reasoning task. According to theoretical arguments, such a large brain is likely related to high cognitive performance (Jerison 1974). the ratio of cortex to body size, is high (2.30, compared to 2.49 for chimpanzees and 7.44 for humans, e.g. Moreover, their encephalization quotient (EQ), i.e. Elephants, especially Asian elephants ( Elephas maximus), have the largest brain of all terrestrial species (approximately 5,000 g). Their intelligence potential is also supported by their anatomical and physiological features. Gould and Gould 1994 Vauclair 1996), the elephants’ ability to use tools seems intriguing in terms of theoretical arguments about animal intelligence.Īs noted above, elephants appear to possess high-level cognitive abilities in various situations. Because it was long believed that only a few species such as chimpanzees and crows spontaneously use tools in the wild (e.g. Moreover, they reported that elephants sometimes modify sticks by breaking them in half when they are too long or by taking leaves off branches when they are too leafy (Hart and Hart 1994). ( 2001) observed that wild and captive Asian elephants use sticks as tools to fend off flies and to scratch their own bodies (e.g. Other evidence of elephant intelligence is their capacity to use tools skillfully. ( 2000) showed that an African elephant recognized the low-frequency contact calls of herd members who had died 23 months before, and even of individual who had left the herd 12 years earlier. The excellent memory performance of elephants was also described in a different study. When different pairs of drawings were presented, the elephant learned the discrimination more and more rapidly (within 10 trials by the fourth pair), and could select them even after 1 year. After several training sessions (330 trials in total), she had learnt to choose the correct drawing. In that study a young female elephant was presented with a pair of drawings and then required to choose the drawing that had been arbitrarily predetermined to be the “correct” one. One seminal study examined to what extent Asian elephants possess the ability to memorize sets of arbitrary drawings (Rensch 1957). Rensch 1956, 1957).Īlthough there is much anecdotal evidence that elephants appear to be intelligent, empirical investigations are scarce. Furthermore, elephants easily learn to understand various sorts of commands that are verbally expressed by circus trainers and jungle dwellers (e.g. Across several countries, elephants have been trained and tamed for public show and labor. This study showed that elephants show means–end behavior when subjected to a Piagetian “support” task, and indicates that such goal-directed behavior occurs in species other than primates.Įlephants are widely believed to be highly intelligent. Results showed that one elephant performed all of the support problems significantly above chance after several sessions, suggesting that the elephant was capable of understanding that pulling the tray was the “means” for achieving the “end” of obtaining the bait. Subjects were required to choose and pull either tray with their trunk and to obtain the bait (i.e. In the last condition, both trays contained bait, but one of the trays had a small gap which prevented the elephants from reaching the reward. In the next two conditions, the bait was placed on one tray, while additional bait was placed beside the other tray. In the first condition, elephants were simultaneously presented with two identical trays serving as the “support”, with the bait on one tray and the other tray left empty. We used captive Asian elephants ( N = 2) to conduct four variations of the Piagetian “support” problem, which involves a goal object that is out of reach, but rests on a support within reach. The present study explores to what extent Asian elephants show “means–end” behavior.
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