I first realised intelligence of an elephant when I had,
during childhood, read a fictional story of immense friendship between the
mammoth animal and a tailor who once lived in a village.
The plot
had it that elephant used to pass through market place in the village daily, and
the friendly tailor always fed him no sooner it had protruded the trunk into the
shop.One evening , the tailor was in an offensive mood and instead of feed ,he
pricked the trunk with a needle.
The
animal quietly retreated though it writhed in pain.Next day, the once friendly
elephant returned with filth and mud filled in the trunk, and splattered the dirt over
neatly stitched and pressed clothes of the shop. Though the moral of the story
was Tit for tat . It spoke volumes about the elephant's intelligence. Many
such eye opening stories of elephants' intelligent mind come forth.
But in a recently published research paper it was found that the Asian elephants have knack of mathematics. Asian elephants demonstrate numeric ability which is closer to that observed in humans rather than in other animals. This is according to lead author Naoko Irie of SOKENDAI (The Graduate University for Advanced Studies) in Japan.
But in a recently published research paper it was found that the Asian elephants have knack of mathematics. Asian elephants demonstrate numeric ability which is closer to that observed in humans rather than in other animals. This is according to lead author Naoko Irie of SOKENDAI (The Graduate University for Advanced Studies) in Japan.
(In the study published in the Springer-branded Journal of Ethology, Irie and her colleagues found
that an Asian elephants' sense of numbers is not affected by distance,
magnitude or ratios of presented numerosities, and therefore provides initial
experimental evidence that non-human animals have cognitive characteristics
similar to human counting.
Previous
research has shown that many animals have some form of numerical competence,
even though they do not use language. However, this numerical ability is mainly
based on inaccurate quantity instead of absolute numbers.
In
this study, the researchers aimed to replicate the results of previous research
that already showed that Asian elephants have exceptional numeric competence.
They developed a new method to test how well the
animals can judge relative quantity. They successfully trained a 14-year old
Asian elephant called Authai from the Ueno Zoo in Japan to use a
computer-controlled touch panel.
The programme was specifically designed to examine the
cognition of elephants, so that any unintended factors potentially influencing
the results could be ruled out.
Authai was presented with a relative numerosity
judgment task on the screen, and then had to indicate with the tip of her trunk
which one of the two figures shown to her at a time contained more items. These
ranged from 0 to 10 items, and contained pictures of bananas, watermelons and
apples. The fruit were not all presented in the same size, to ensure that
Authai did not make her choices purely on the total area that was covered with
illustrations per card.
Authai was rewarded whenever she chose the figures
featuring the larger number of items. This she did correctly 181 out of 271
times – a success rate of 66.8 per cent. Her ability to accurately pinpoint the
figure with the most fruits on it was not affected by the magnitude, distance
or ratio of the comparisons.
Authai’s
reaction time was, however, influenced by the distance and ratio between the
two figures presented. She needed significantly more time to make her selection
between figures where relatively smaller distances and larger ratios were
presented.
“We found that her performance was unaffected by
distance, magnitude, or the ratios of the presented numerosities, but
consistent with observations of human counting, she required a longer time to
respond to comparisons with smaller distances,” explains Irie. “This study provides the first experimental evidence that
nonhuman animals have cognitive characteristics partially identical to human
counting.”
According to Irie, this is not an
ability that the Asian elephant shares with the two species of African
elephants. She says that because the species diverged more than 7.6 million
years ago, it is highly probable that each developed different cognitive abilities.)
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