Elephants know when you’re watching—how they recognize human visual attention

With their swinging ears and their long trunks, it is not difficult to believe that elephants tend to rely on acoustic and olfactory clues for communication. They also use visual gestures and screens to communicate, but we don’t really know how much. Research on visual communication has mainly focused on species that are mainly visual, such as non -human primates.

A previous study has shown that African savannah elephants can recognize human visual attention according to the orientation of the face and body of a person, but this had not yet been studied in its Asian cousins. Asian elephants separated from African elephants millions of years ago, so their behavior and their cognition differ in certain aspects.

Motivated to find out if Asian elephants share this capacity with African elephants, a team of researchers from the University of Kyoto has turned their attention to elephants in Thailand. The results were published in Scientific relationships.

“After having carried out doctoral work on how elephants form the reputation, I wanted to test if the Asian elephants understand when humans pay them attention,” explains the corresponding author Hoi-Llam Jim.

The research team went to Chiang Rai in northern Thailand, where they hired 10 captivity elephants in a requesting task. The experimenter led the task while arranging his body orientation in one of the four positions: with his face and his body towards the elephant, with the two far from the elephant, only the face towards, or only the body towards the elephant.

The team then analyzed the frequency to which the elephant directed signals to the experimenter in each position, including the elephant’s reaction when the experimenter was not present.

The researchers observed that the elephants made the most gesture when the body and the face of the experimenter were oriented towards them, and the body orientation seemed to be a visual signal stronger than the orientation of the face. However, this effect depended on the face also oriented towards the elephant.

“We were surprised to see that the elephants did not make a gesture simply because a human was present,” said Jim. When no one was there, the elephants made a gesture as if a person stood there with his body turned away. This shows that elephants are sensitive to body orientation, but that they do not respond to the simple presence of a human.

These results suggest that Asian elephants effectively include the importance of visual attention for effective communication, and that elephants are not sensitive to facial or body orientation, but rather on a combination of clues to recognize human visual attention.

By revealing more about the intelligence of elephants, how it is compared to species and how complex capacities evolve in animals, this study deepens our understanding of the cognition of elephants and adds to wider research on visual attention in animals. In the future, the research team plans to focus on other aspects of the cognition of Asian elephants, such as cooperation, prosociality and delayed gratuity.