Do Elephants Recognize Human Visual Attention?
While elephants are well known for their reliance on acoustic and olfactory communication, less is understood about how they interpret visual cues. Prior work demonstrated that African savanna elephants can recognize human visual attention, but whether Asian elephants share this ability remained unclear.
Researchers from Kyoto University conducted a controlled study in Chiang Rai, Thailand, with ten captive female Asian elephants. Using a food-requesting paradigm, the team evaluated the animals’ responses to a human experimenter positioned in four orientations:
Face and body directed toward the elephant
Face and body directed away
Face toward, body away
Body toward, face away
The elephants’ signaling behavior was measured across conditions, as well as during a control phase when no human was present.
Key findings:
Elephants signaled most frequently when both the face and body of the human were oriented toward them.
Body orientation served as a stronger cue than face orientation, but both were required for consistent recognition.
Elephants did not gesture merely in response to human presence; some even gestured when no human was present but as if responding to an imagined person facing away.
These results suggest that Asian elephants possess sensitivity to human visual attention, relying on combined facial and bodily cues rather than isolated signals.
Lead author Hoi-Lam Jim notes that the findings expand our understanding of elephant cognition, providing comparative insights into how communicative abilities may differ across elephant species. Future work will explore additional aspects of Asian elephant cognition, including cooperation, prosociality, and delayed gratification.
This research underscores the importance of studying species-specific cognition not only to advance our understanding of elephant behavior but also to inform welfare and management practices for captive and wild populations.
