Extraordinary elephant perception

Identifying important connectivity areas for the wide‐ranging Asian elephant across conservation landscapes of Northeast India

“…walks (Figure 3a). This finding aligns with what we know about elephant biology, though much of our knowledge is gained from African elephants: elephants have high cognitive and perceptive abilities (Plotnik & de Waal, 2014), store and share substantive knowledge accumulated over a long lifespan with their herd via social cues (McComb et al, 2001), and use spatial memory to determine movement paths (Polansky et al, 2015). With further information on elephant movement decisions, and their perceptual windows, we hope to be able to fine-tune our estimation of appropriate θs.…”

High tech cognitive and acoustic enrichment for captive elephants

“…"They live in a world that is largely acoustic and olfactory rather than visual." (Plotnik and De Waal, 2014) Yet it seems that vision does have a significant part to play in the design -when we changed the location of the devices to the balcony rail and the enclosure bars, the elephants moved directly towards the novel items as soon as they saw them. This highlights how, in order to provide an interactive experience for a different species, it is necessary to consider the modalities that are appropriate for the species and moreover, that any assumptions about the nature of these modalities might need to be verified.…”