Elephants can tell when we're looking at them - and it affects how they behave

Photo by paweldotio on Unsplash

It’s no secret that elephants are highly social beings; they live in complex matriarchal societies, form life-long bonds and even grieve their dead. With the largest brain of any living land mammal, they are also highly intelligent — they’re self-aware, use tools to solve complex problems and — as we know from the age-old saying — have incredible memories.

So how well can they pick up on human behaviour?

With their characteristically large ears and long trunks, elephants often rely on sound and smell when communicating. How much they rely on visual cues is less well understood.

Much research on visual communication in the animal kingdom has looked at animals that rely heavily on good sight, like primates. Studies have shown species including chimpanzees, bonobos, orang-utans and macaques will gesture differently depending on whether a human is giving them attention. For example, they might gesture for food when a person is angled towards them, but not when they’re being ignored.

So, researchers at Kyoto University decided to investigate whether Asian elephants might behave similarly.

“After conducting doctoral work on how elephants form reputations, I wanted to test whether Asian elephants understand when humans are paying attention to them,” says, Hoi-Lam Jim, corresponding author of the new study published in Scientific Reports.

Previous research has shown that African elephants (Loxodonta africana) can tell when a human is giving them visual attention based on the orientation of their face and body. But this had not yet been tested on Asian elephants (Elephas maximus), which despite being relatives of their African counterparts, have their own unique behavioural and cognitive traits — African and Asian elephant lineages diverged 5 to 7 million years ago.

Mahouts and mangoes

The Kyoto researchers studied 10 captive female elephants in Chiang Rai in northern Thailand. The experiment involved a “food-requesting task”, which involved each elephant’s mahout (a person who works with and cares for an elephant) arranging their body in one of 4 different positions. These were:

1. Both face and body towards the elephant

2. Both face and body away from the elephant

3. Face toward the elephant, but not body

4. Body toward the elephant, but not face

   
   

The researchers recorded the experiment using GoPro cameras positioned at different angles. They then examined how the elephants behaved in response to the different positions — effectively, whether they used gestures to signal to the mahout that they wanted a tasty mango or not. How the elephants responded when there was no mahout present was also taken into account.

The team found that the elephants gestured most when the mahout had both their face and body positioned towards them, suggesting they knew the person was looking at them and it was worth asking them for a snack.

“We were surprised to find that the elephants did not gesture simply because a human was present,” notes Jim.

The results suggest that visual cues are an important tool for elephants when it comes to communication with humans. They also show that elephants use a combination of different visual cues to help them understand a human’s behaviour; the elephants gestured more when both face and body were angled towards them, rather than just face or body.

“This study is the first to demonstrate that Asian elephants are sensitive to human attentional states,” write the authors. “While body orientation appeared to be a stronger visual cue than face orientation, this effect was only observed when the face was also oriented towards the elephant.”

The research offers new insights into elephant intelligence and the evolution of complex social and cognitive abilities across different species.

However, it’s important to note that the elephants used in the study were tame and used to human interaction. Whether wild elephants can decipher between a person giving them visual attention or looking away remains to be seen.

The Kyoto research team now plans to examine other aspects of Asian elephant cognition, including cooperation, prosociality and delayed gratification.