shows they have maths skills 'closer to humans'
The Asian elephant who learnt to use a tablet: Incredible experiment reveals the animals have maths skills 'closer to humans than other animals'
- Researchers in Tokyo were able to teach Authai, a 14 year old female, to use a giant touchscreen showing maths problems
Was able to successfully choose from pictures which contained the most items
The elephant was able to choose by pointing at the right answer with her trunk
Researchers in Tokyo were able to teach Authai, a 14 year old female elephant, to use a giant touchscreen showing maths problems.
She was able to successfully choose from pictures which contained the most items - by pointing at them with her trunk.
Authai, a 14 year old female elephant, was able to use a specially developed tablet using her trunk. She was able to complete math problems with a 67% success rate.
HOW DO YOU GIVE AN ELEPHANT A MATHS TEST?
Researchers in Tokyo were able to teach Authai, a 14 year old female elephant, to use a giant screen showing maths problems.
Authai was given 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.
She was able to successfully choose from pictures which contained the most items - by pointing at them with her trunk.
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.
'Asian elephants’ numerical representation is quite different from that of other animals,' the researchers wrote in the Journal of Ethology.
'We trained three Asian elephants to use a touch-panel apparatus and one female successfully learned to use the apparatus.
'Next, a relative numerosity judgment task was presented on the screen and the elephant was asked to touch, with the tip of her trunk, the figures with the larger numbers of items.'
The numbers of items in each figure ranged from 0 to 10.
'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.
'This study provides the first experimental evidence that nonhuman animals have cognitive characteristics partially identical to human counting,' said Naoko Irie of SOKENDAI (The Graduate University for Advanced Studies and the Japan Society for the Promotion of Science) in Japan, who led the research.
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.
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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