African elephants can use human pointing cues to find hidden food
Date
21/10/2013Metadata
Show full item recordAbstract
How animals gain information from attending to the behavior of others has been widely studied, driven partly by the importance of referential pointing in human cognitive development [1, 2, 3 and 4], but species differences in reading human social cues remain unexplained. One explanation is that this capacity evolved during domestication [5 and 6], but it may be that only those animals able to interpret human-like social cues were successfully domesticated. Elephants are a critical taxon for this question: despite their longstanding use by humans, they have never been domesticated [7]. Here we show that a group of 11 captive African elephants, seven of them significantly as individuals, could interpret human pointing to find hidden food. We suggest that success was not due to prior training or extensive learning opportunities. Elephants successfully interpreted pointing when the experimenter’s proximity to the hiding place was varied and when the ostensive pointing gesture was visually subtle, suggesting that they understood the experimenter’s communicative intent. The elephant’s native ability in interpreting social cues may have contributed to its long history of effective use by man.
Citation
Smet , A F & Byrne , R W 2013 , ' African elephants can use human pointing cues to find hidden food ' , Current Biology , vol. 23 , no. 20 , pp. 2033-2037 . https://doi.org/10.1016/j.cub.2013.08.037
Publication
Current Biology
Status
Peer reviewed
ISSN
0960-9822Type
Journal article
Rights
© 2013 Elsevier Ltd All rights reserved. This is an Accepted Manuscript of an article published in Current Biology on 21 October 2013, available online: http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0960982213010439#
Description
We thank the School of Psychology and Neuroscience of the University of St Andrews for providing the funding for this research.Collections
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