Just when you thought it was safe to play favourites (it turns out they exhibit relative quantity judgement)
If you come to my camp and ask me which is my favourite elephant I'll tell you that I don't have one, can't have one, and that they are all equal to me. Apart from the fact that is an outright lie it seems to me to be a sensible policy, you don't get Bodo or Michel telling you which is their favourite department head, no-one ever asks Amp who is her favourite mahout - the difference between myself and the above mentioned professionals is, of course, that you only have to hang around in camp awhile and my obvious favouritism shines through.
Favouritism to the point that I recently, pretending to be professional, challenged a journalist to an electronic guessing game and refused to divulge my favourite until he guessed it within about three e-mails (those flying Emirates Air this December can find this out for themselves as he went and printed - luckily though, I can rely safely assume none of the other potentially jealous girls and boys will get to read it as 1, we don't think they can read and 2, they are unlikely to find themselves in Emirates Business Class as I am too tight to pay for a ticket for their Christmas holidays, the ticket itself is OK, it is the excess baggage that gets me - packed trunk and all that).
But we know from a thousand years of anecdotes that eles have a good memory and can hold a grudge as well as a candle. So at times like this when I've got a couple of bags of sunflower seeds in my office (I was in town yesterday buying stuff for an ele dung project when I saw them and couldn't resist) which I go out and feed to the eles a handful at a time, how careful do I need to be not to slip an extra handful to the eyelid flashing favourite of today?
Well, according to a paper that has been sitting on my desktop for some time (Relative quantity judgment by Asian elephants by Naoko Irie-Sugimoto, Tessei Kobayashi, Takao Sato and Toshikazu Hasegawa) very.
As you'd expect it, not wanting to give myself a headache, it was the relative quantity judgment bit of the title that had it gathering dust until I worked out what the phrase really meant and that, scientist being scientists, they couldn't really say 'counting'.
Actually, and in fairness, not quite: R.Q.J. (as those of us in the know call it) doesn't necessarily mean counting, it just means the ability to look at too separate quantities and judge which is the greater - not quite the same thing. What our clever Japanese friends did was to fill two bowls with different amounts of bananas and allowed elephants to choose just one - the eles themselves unerringly (well statistically speaking) picked the fuller bowl, something that seems to make sense but apparently the behaviour was only previously seen in non-human apes and cotton top tamarins.
Where elephants split away from other tested animals, apart from ourselves, was the way they coped with disparity and magnitude effects (again a phrase that the scientists felt, quite rightly, that they had to explain to me) - while the cleverer primates could quite easily tell the difference between a bowl with one piece of bait and one with six pieces, routinely choosing the fuller, it seems they had troubles choosing the better between a bowl of three and a bowl of four; elephants, it seems had no such worries.
So far, so clever, elephants pick the fuller bowl of food and can weigh up the better between two options while realising the zero sum nature of the game - the other bowl gets taken away - instead of instinctively reaching for something just because it is food, further still they're better at making finer judgments than anything so far tested (on a par with human children).
But, being scientists, Naoko-san and friends decided to push it a step further, what if instead of letting the elephants see the bait in both bowls they could only watch both bowls being loaded and then choose before they got to see what was in a bowl? Well, blow me away if elephants (albeit a different set of elephants - making this even more convincing) couldn't do that as well, they watched the hand movements, heard the thump as the bait hit the bottom of the bowl, remembered which number of noises corresponded to which bowls and then chose the bowl with the greater number of previously loaded bait.
Sorry Roy, but this isn't trigger on stage stamping his foot, this is a not-so-hungry (but famously food obsessed) beast counting and remembering actions that they know can be associated with amounts of sweet stuff.
The researchers concluded that the reason for this reasoning may be an ancient necessity to work out the size of an approaching herd, or an ability to count mateable females before signing allegiances, but who knows?
They were also confused that while all eles (though they were pre-screened for willingness to take part) performed well in the experiments, one (with the auspicious initials T.R.) couldn't grasp the disparity factors and fell apart when the amounts in each bowl were both large and close to each other - well, I can hazard a guess on that one, we know not all eles are uniquely gifted or fussy when it comes food, so perhaps once you get past a certain point the greedier eles just figure "who cares? enough is enough".
The failure of one tested elephant to worry about the difference between a bowl of 5 oranges and a bowl of 6 oranges notwithstanding it seems worryingly sure that the things are watching and they are counting, maybe not how many sunflower seeds in a handful (though who knows) but certainly how many handfuls and they're remembering. No way I can play favourite if they know I gave someone three handfuls and someone else only two, with humans, of course, I can make excuses for my actions, but with elephants - even if they understand, no-one has yet proven that they'll listen - it will have to be straight down the line equal treatment.
Sorry Lynch, no more favours!
Favouritism to the point that I recently, pretending to be professional, challenged a journalist to an electronic guessing game and refused to divulge my favourite until he guessed it within about three e-mails (those flying Emirates Air this December can find this out for themselves as he went and printed - luckily though, I can rely safely assume none of the other potentially jealous girls and boys will get to read it as 1, we don't think they can read and 2, they are unlikely to find themselves in Emirates Business Class as I am too tight to pay for a ticket for their Christmas holidays, the ticket itself is OK, it is the excess baggage that gets me - packed trunk and all that).
But we know from a thousand years of anecdotes that eles have a good memory and can hold a grudge as well as a candle. So at times like this when I've got a couple of bags of sunflower seeds in my office (I was in town yesterday buying stuff for an ele dung project when I saw them and couldn't resist) which I go out and feed to the eles a handful at a time, how careful do I need to be not to slip an extra handful to the eyelid flashing favourite of today?
Well, according to a paper that has been sitting on my desktop for some time (Relative quantity judgment by Asian elephants by Naoko Irie-Sugimoto, Tessei Kobayashi, Takao Sato and Toshikazu Hasegawa) very.
As you'd expect it, not wanting to give myself a headache, it was the relative quantity judgment bit of the title that had it gathering dust until I worked out what the phrase really meant and that, scientist being scientists, they couldn't really say 'counting'.
Actually, and in fairness, not quite: R.Q.J. (as those of us in the know call it) doesn't necessarily mean counting, it just means the ability to look at too separate quantities and judge which is the greater - not quite the same thing. What our clever Japanese friends did was to fill two bowls with different amounts of bananas and allowed elephants to choose just one - the eles themselves unerringly (well statistically speaking) picked the fuller bowl, something that seems to make sense but apparently the behaviour was only previously seen in non-human apes and cotton top tamarins.
Where elephants split away from other tested animals, apart from ourselves, was the way they coped with disparity and magnitude effects (again a phrase that the scientists felt, quite rightly, that they had to explain to me) - while the cleverer primates could quite easily tell the difference between a bowl with one piece of bait and one with six pieces, routinely choosing the fuller, it seems they had troubles choosing the better between a bowl of three and a bowl of four; elephants, it seems had no such worries.
So far, so clever, elephants pick the fuller bowl of food and can weigh up the better between two options while realising the zero sum nature of the game - the other bowl gets taken away - instead of instinctively reaching for something just because it is food, further still they're better at making finer judgments than anything so far tested (on a par with human children).
But, being scientists, Naoko-san and friends decided to push it a step further, what if instead of letting the elephants see the bait in both bowls they could only watch both bowls being loaded and then choose before they got to see what was in a bowl? Well, blow me away if elephants (albeit a different set of elephants - making this even more convincing) couldn't do that as well, they watched the hand movements, heard the thump as the bait hit the bottom of the bowl, remembered which number of noises corresponded to which bowls and then chose the bowl with the greater number of previously loaded bait.
Sorry Roy, but this isn't trigger on stage stamping his foot, this is a not-so-hungry (but famously food obsessed) beast counting and remembering actions that they know can be associated with amounts of sweet stuff.
The researchers concluded that the reason for this reasoning may be an ancient necessity to work out the size of an approaching herd, or an ability to count mateable females before signing allegiances, but who knows?
They were also confused that while all eles (though they were pre-screened for willingness to take part) performed well in the experiments, one (with the auspicious initials T.R.) couldn't grasp the disparity factors and fell apart when the amounts in each bowl were both large and close to each other - well, I can hazard a guess on that one, we know not all eles are uniquely gifted or fussy when it comes food, so perhaps once you get past a certain point the greedier eles just figure "who cares? enough is enough".
The failure of one tested elephant to worry about the difference between a bowl of 5 oranges and a bowl of 6 oranges notwithstanding it seems worryingly sure that the things are watching and they are counting, maybe not how many sunflower seeds in a handful (though who knows) but certainly how many handfuls and they're remembering. No way I can play favourite if they know I gave someone three handfuls and someone else only two, with humans, of course, I can make excuses for my actions, but with elephants - even if they understand, no-one has yet proven that they'll listen - it will have to be straight down the line equal treatment.
Sorry Lynch, no more favours!
Posted by John Roberts at Wed, 09 Dec 2009 13:37:00 GMT 
Categories: Thailand Elephants, Scientific Research in Camp
Categories: Thailand Elephants, Scientific Research in Camp
Oh.... poor Lynchee! We all want to be someone's favorite.
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