Most cognitive experiments done with primates or birds use human-centric paradigms that rely on vision and are not asking the question in the right way; that is, a way that allows the animal to use its own sensory perspective.
MARY BATES: ‘A new study finds that elephants can discriminate between two quantities of food using only their sense of smell. The study, published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, is one of the first to test magnitude discrimination in an animal outside the visual domain… Elephants do use vision, but it is primarily a complement to their more dominant senses of hearing, smell, and touch…
Many species can tell the difference between more and less when it comes to food, choosing the greater quantity when given the chance, but they have done so based on what they can see. Elephants, however, show mixed results in tests like these. Joshua Plotnik, a comparative psychologist at Hunter College, City University of New York, and the new study’s lead author, thought their performance could be due to the design of the tests.
“Most cognitive experiments that are done with primates or birds use human-centric paradigms that rely on vision,” he says. “If you give an elephant a task that a child or a chimpanzee can solve but the elephant cannot, is it because the elephant isn’t capable or is it because we’re not asking the question in the right way; that is, a way that allows the animal to use its own sensory perspective?”…
“We’re not looking to simply compare intelligence; I think that’s an unfair question to ask,” says Plotnik. “Evolution helps animals adapt to the environment in which they live. We’re trying to figure out what sort of cognitive abilities a particular species has and why those capacities have evolved based on what we know about that species.” Another reason for this research, besides better understanding the evolution of intelligence across species, is to help mitigate human-elephant conflict and support elephant conservation in the wild’. SOURCE…
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