Elephants understand pointing, even when they have no experience with humans. Photo used with permission from Anna Smet, all rights reserved.
If you ever need to show something to an elephant, just point to it and most likely he’ll understand what you mean. At least, that’s what a team of researchers from the University of St Andrew’s, UK concluded from their study.
Social Perception in Elephants
The results raise the interesting possibility that elephants have a much deeper social perception than we previously thought. “With the possible exception of domestic dogs, no other animal spontaneously interprets pointing correctly,” says Prof Richard Byrne, lead author in the study, speaking to Decoded Science.
“They have to learn it over many trials, and some, like the chimpanzee, are pretty poor even at doing that.”
Finding elephants to conduct this study wasn’t easy. But after some perseverance, Prof Byrne’s PhD student, Anna Smet, found ‘Wild Horizons‘ in Victoria Fall, Zimbabwe. As an ethical enterprise, this group rescues elephants and use human training methods to get the animals used in gentle ’employment’ as riding elephants.
Studying Elephant Perceptions
During the study, every morning Smet would set up the buckets for the test. This was done in such a way that the animals could see her putting food in a bucket, but had no way of knowing which bucket it was. Each elephant was then presented with two buckets, but only one with food. When the animal was watching, Smet would point to the bucket containing the food and take note of which one the elephant attempted first. She found that the elephants picked the right bucket about 67.5% of the time.
One-year old human babies perform just slightly better at 72% in similar tests.
No Training: Elephants Just Understand Pointing
What’s so remarkable about this study is that the elephants did it naturally, without any previous training and showed no improvements during the study.”The elephants did not seem to need to learn how to understanding pointing, they were just as good on trial 1 as any other!” explains Byrne. This is highly unusual, as other species, even if they come to realise what pointing means, it’s after a few unsuccessful attempts at finding the food.
To find out how good elephants really were at understanding pointing, Byrne and Smet decided to make things a little harder. Instead of pointing directly to the bucket with food, Smet had to point to the bucket on the other side, with her arm crossing her body. This usually affects how good children are at this test, but elephants performed just as well.
Some animals were confused when Smet stood closer to the wrong bucket but still pointed to the other one, but most still found the bucket with food.
The only test that elephants couldn’t understand was when Smet simply looked at the bucket with food, but didn’t point. This is more likely to be caused by the elephant’s poor eyesight, rather than an inability to understand the movement, explain the authors.
Click to Read Page Two: Human Contact and Gestures Responsible for Elephant Understanding?
© Copyright 2013 Alexandra Reis, PhD, All rights Reserved. Written For: Decoded Science
Alligators point in two directions, so what does the elephant do if it sees an alligator?
It took them two hundred years to figure this out?
Considering how close the pachyderm – the end of its trunk, particularly – is to the buckets (if the accompanying photo. is representative), it actually looks like the elephant is getting ready to reward the human… for pointing at the correct bucket.
Point to a solution and I bet obamma won’t understand.
He keeps pointing at the elephants; but, they keep acting like they don’t have any idea what he’s pointing at.
Pointedly won’t understand.
yet another anomaly in the evolutionary paradigm
Very Cool!
I think I’ll use this for my “Current Events” Social Studies Project!
Do you imagine that a human baby would perceive static symbols as directions?
A significant & troubling number of human adults have that same problem with traffic signs.
my pet Cockatiel understands pointing
And dogs have compassion where few humans and no politicians do.
My dog is so smart he even cleans the cat’s box.
LOL. Makes a couple of my dogs really smart, too, in a gross kind of way.
I had someone’s dog eat my chili once, after I at it.
Cancer research all finished ?
Because we’d get so much further if we only worked on just one problem at a time and didn’t bother to understand anything else. 8 billion cancer scientists, because why bother with any other problem,
Did they consider elephant’s keen sense of smell, which could be about 10 times stronger than that of a dog?
I hear that. If my nose were 8 feet long, I’d probably be able to pick the one with the food – blindfolded.
I’m not a scientist, I’m an artist so I like to make guesses based on exciting news like this. When I learned dogs are the only animal which understand pointing, I was very fascinated. Now to find that elephants understand it, I wonder if it is because of the long trunks of their noses. If you have a long nose, you can see it in your field of vision, though very blurry and you don’t usually pay attention to it. If you are taking pictures as a model, you can use your nose position to better gauge the position of your eyes and chin to make them balanced and symmetric. So I wonder if the very large trunks of the elephant, paired with the other essential biological functions of the trunk, act as pointers in their elephant world. A human arm might sort of resemble a trunk in its proportion and in that the arm retrieves objects, especially food. But I’m just flat out-guessing here 🙂 Perhaps there is an even more fascinating explanation awaiting our discovery. Science is so inspiring to me!
I’ll bet when they get ‘confused’ it’s because they think we’re trying to bullshit them… they probably, routinely, play practical jokes amongst themselves, by attempting to fool each other into looking where(ever) they point.
Do the elephants naturally communicate in the wild by using their trunks to point?
That depends upon one’s point of view.
Something tells me that ‘we’ are – just now, empirically – ‘discovering’ something… which the people who live among and around elephants have known for millennia.
Every time we learn more of just how intelligent the elephant and dolphin really are, it just makes it more tragic as we continue to slaughter them.
67.5%…