Animal cognition research offers outreach opportunity
By: Proceedings Of The National Academy Of Sciences
Tags: Cognition, Problem Solving, Conservation, Animals, Elephants

The children are having a great time. But this game of “losing space” also has a serious message. With human populations growing and wildlife habitat shrinking, there’s less room for people and animals. In Thailand, that’s led to increasing conflicts between crop-raiding elephants and farmers. These clashes go beyond the research realm, involving a complex interplay of conservation, economics, and societal concerns. So the scientist behind the exercise, Hunter College psychologist and elephant researcher Joshua Plotnik, figured he needed to branch out beyond his fieldwork on elephant cognition and find ways to use his research to help reduce those conflicts. “The fight to protect elephants and other endangered species needed a new focus — classrooms,” he says.

Plotnik has taken the unusual steps of setting up his own conservation and education nonprofit, Think Elephants International, and working with schools in the United States and Thailand. One project resulted in his coauthoring a journal article with middle school kids. “It is imperative as scientists that we use our unique skills and knowledge to do conservation on the ground and to educate people,” says Plotnik.

Of course, researchers have long worked tirelessly to save the animals they study. Think Jane Goodall with chimpanzees, Dian Fossey with gorillas, or Iain Douglas-Hamilton, who founded Save the Elephants. Conservation is virtually part of the job description for these field scientists, says Emory University primatologist Frans de Waal, who is Plotnik’s former advisor. “If they are not there to take care of the animals and educate the local people, who will do it? They don’t even look at it as a choice.”

What’s different now, though, is that the conservation and education mantle is being increasingly assumed by a new type of researcher — those, like Plotnik, who probe the cognitive abilities of animals — and driven by startling new discoveries of animal intelligence. “We’re learning that we humans are not alone in our cognitive complexity,” says Plotnik. Such insights not only fascinate students but could potentially help them form a stronger connection with elephants and other animals that appear to have cognitive capacities once reserved for humans.

Thought Experiment

The last several years have brought an array of intriguing new insights into animals’ cognitive capacities, across several different species. Both elephants and an endangered New Zealand parrot called a kea, for example, will cooperate on a task to get food, and they do so as well as or better than chimps do. In the experiment, which Plotnik did with elephants in Thailand and Alexander Taylor, a psychologist at the University of Auckland, and colleagues did with kea, the animals must simultaneously pull on both ends of a rope looped through two pulleys on a platform to move the platform and the food toward them. Pulling on just one end will simply yank out the rope, leaving the food out of reach.

In one of many recent studies on crow species, Taylor has shown that New Caledonian crows can figure out an eight-step puzzle that requires dropping a series of stones into a box. That adds enough weight to release a long stick that the bird can use as a tool to snare a tasty morsel. “They are amazingly good at solving problems,” says Taylor. Other recent work has shown that creatures as disparate as dolphins and magpies have some degree of self-awareness based on their ability to recognize themselves in a mirror.

The discoveries raise fascinating, if still unanswered, questions about the evolution of intelligence and whether various animals “think” in similar or different ways. “The questions go to the heart of who we are as humans and the nature of life around us,” says Taylor.

“The questions go to the heart of who we are as humans and the nature of life around us.” — Alexander Taylor

At the same time, they offer new avenues for conservation efforts. One key notion is that teaching people about animals’ surprising intelligence and emotions might lead to a stronger moral concern to protect, even cherish, the creatures. Taylor and Plotnik are now trying to figure out how to rigorously test this possible connection, which does seem to be supported by anecdotal evidence. Studying New Caledonian crows on the Pacific island of Maré, Taylor recalls how “a farmer proudly came up to me and said: ‘I shot 15 crows today.’” But after Taylor described the crow’s remarkable abilities, which include being the only nonhuman creature known to make tools, the farmer’s attitudes changed. “’You showed me crows are intelligent and not just pests; I won’t shoot them anymore,’” Taylor recalls him saying.

For Plotnik, the light bulb went off after a landmark experiment in 2005 proving that elephants are self-aware — a sign of intelligence. The standard experiment is to mark an animal’s face with a dot or X, then put the animal in front of a mirror to see if it recognizes that the mark is on its own face. Chimps can do it, but monkeys and dogs can’t. “Many species continue to treat the image as if represents a stranger, indefinitely,” Plotnik explains.

Few cognitive tests had been done on elephants, “partly because they are hard to work with,” says de Waal. So when Wildlife Conservation Society researcher Diana Reiss, now a psychology professor at Hunter, and de Waal took up a plan to have a PhD student to come to the Bronx Zoo (which the Society manages) and do the mirror test on an Asian elephant named Happy, Plotnik jumped at the chance. Reiss and Plotnik knew that, years earlier, an elephant had flunked the test. They believed the previous experiment was flawed, though. Elephants seem to rely more on touch and smell than on sight to understand their world, yet the test had used a small, out-of-reach mirror.

Plotnik set up a jumbo-sized 8- by 8-foot mirror that Happy could touch and reach behind. She quickly realized she was seeing herself, and reached up to touch the mark on her face. “It was thrilling,” Plotnik says.

New Caledonian crows can quickly figure out what length stick to use to retrieve food. Image courtesy of Amalia Bastos (University of Auckland, Auckland, New Zealand).

Elephant Inspiration

The breakthrough put Plotnik on a path to studying elephant cognition in the field; he has now been working in Thailand for more than a decade. The mirror experiment also received widespread press coverage. Soon Plotnik was getting a flood of emails from fascinated children, and he realized the power of elephant research to inspire new generations. Working with a school principal in Manhattan and Jennifer Pokorny, another former student of de Waal’s, he hatched a plan for an afterschool program to teach middle-school kids about conservation and animal behavior.

In the 2-year program, the students acted out clashes between elephants and farmers, and learned how the animals react to threats. And in one experiment that the students themselves helped design, Plotnik tested his elephants in Thailand to see if the animals followed their handlers’ hand signals to find a bucket with food. The elephants did not, as the students reported in an article in PLoS One. Instead elephants went to the correct bucket only when Plotnik or the handlers used voice commands as well, demonstrating again how much the animals rely on sound for social cues rather than sight.

The experience convinced Plotnik of the value of education in raising awareness about the plight of elephants. So for his next act, before moving to the University of Cambridge for postdoctoral work comparing elephant and crow cognition, he launched Think Elephants International in 2011. The nonprofit is still taking shape, but the idea is to both expand teaching efforts in schools — they’ve piloted curricula that include activities such as the “losing space” habitat game — and translate research findings into innovative conservation efforts. “I thought developing a nonprofit would help me learn new skills and also could be a vehicle for raising funds,” he explains. Yes, on both counts. “It was an incredible experience getting that off the ground,” he says.

Plotnik and others are now contemplating another application for animal cognition findings: Perhaps the results can point to better strategies for protecting endangered animals. Many approaches for keeping elephants away from people and crops involve scaring the animals with firecrackers or electric fences. To be more successful, however, strategies “need to better account for why the elephants are crop raiding in first place and deal with the underlying issue that the animals want something,” Plotnik explains.

For instance, there might be forested corridors across plantations that allow elephants to travel without trampling crops, de Waal suggests. Or perhaps smells or sounds, such as the buzz of bees, might successfully steer an animal that relies so heavily on auditory and olfactory cues away from conflicts with humans.

The prospects for such measures are still unclear. But the fact that they are being considered at all is bringing new hope and enthusiasm to conservation, says de Waal. Plotnik is optimistic that some of those Thai children who played the “losing space” game with him and learned about elephant intelligence will help devise new solutions. “The task is desperate for many animals,” de Waal says. But he sees “a great future for the mix of scientific curiosity and conservation orientation” that Plotnik and others are pursuing.

Published under the PNAS license. Original article, with full references, at PNAS.org.