According to new research, Asian elephants (Elephas maximus) are able to recognize their own bodies as obstacles to success in problem-solving, further strengthening evidence of their intelligence.
Once standing on the mat, elephants were instructed to pick up the stick and give it to the experimenter. Image credit: E. Gilchrist.
“Elephants are well regarded as one of the most intelligent animals on the planet, but we still need more empirical, scientific evidence to support this belief,” said Rachel Dale, a Ph.D. student at the University of Veterinary Medicine in Vienna, Austria, and first author of a paper reporting the results in the journal Scientific Reports on April 12, 2017.
“We know, for example, that they are capable of thoughtful cooperation and empathy, and are able to recognize themselves in a mirror. These abilities are highly unusual in animals and very rare indeed in non-primates. We wanted to see if they also show body-awareness.”
Self-awareness in both animals and young children is usually tested using the ‘mirror self-recognition test’ to see if they understand that the reflection in front of them is actually their own.
Only a few species have so far shown themselves capable of self-recognition — great apes, dolphins, magpies and elephants.
Critics, however, have argued that this test is limited in its ability to investigate complex thoughts and understanding, and that it may be less useful in testing animals who rely less on vision than other species.
One potential complement to the mirror test as a measure of self-understanding may be a test of ‘body-awareness.’
This test looks at how individuals may recognize their bodies as obstacles to success in a problem-solving task.
Such a task could demonstrate an individual’s understanding of its body in relation to its physical environment, which may be easier to define than the distinction between oneself and another demonstrated through success at the mirror test.
To test for body-awareness in Asian elephants, Dale and her colleague, University of Cambridge researcher Dr. Josh Plotnik, devised a new test of self-awareness.
“Adapting a recent study done with children, we designed a new body-awareness paradigm for testing an animal’s understanding of its place in its environment,” they explained.
“In this task, Asian elephants were required to step onto a mat and pick up a stick attached to it by rope, and then pass the stick forward to an experimenter.”
“In order to do the latter, the elephants had to see their body as an obstacle to success and first remove their weight from the mat before attempting to transfer the stick.”
In one control arm of the test, the stick was unattached to the mat, meaning the elephant could pass the stick while standing on the mat.
The scientists found that the elephants stepped off the mat to pass the stick to the experimenter significantly more often during the test than during the control arm: elephants stepped off the mat an average of around 42 out of 48 times during the test compared to just three times on average during the control.
“This is a deceptively simple test, but its implications are quite profound,” said Dr. Plotnik, who is also an assistant professor of psychology at Hunter College, City University of New York and founder of conservation charity Think Elephants International.
“The elephants understood that their bodies were getting in the way, so they stepped aside to enable themselves to complete the task. In a similar test, this is something that young children are unable to understand until they are about two years old.”
“This implies that elephants may be capable of recognizing themselves as separate from objects or their environment. This means that they may have a level of self-understanding, coupled with their passing of the mirror test, which is quite rare in the animal kingdom.”
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Rachel Dale Joshua M. Plotnik. 2017. Elephants know when their bodies are obstacles to success in a novel transfer task. Scientific Reports 7, article number: 46309; doi: 10.1038/srep46309
This article is based on text provided by the University of Cambridge.
